Musical Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari 9781501316746, 9781501316777, 9781501316753

Citation preview

Musical Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari

Musical Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari Edited by

Pirkko Moisala, Taru Leppänen, Milla Tiainen and Hanna Väätäinen

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Pirkko Moisala, Taru Leppänen, Milla Tiainen, and Hanna Väätäinen, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Moisala, Pirkko, editor. | Leppèanen, Taru, editor. | Tiainen, Milla, editor. | Vèaèatèainen, Hanna, 1972- editor. Title: Musical encounters with Deleuze and Guattari / edited by Pirkko Moisala, Leppèanen, Milla Tiainen, and Hanna Vèaèatèainen. Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2016027333 (print) | LCCN 2016028784 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501316746 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781501316753 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781501316760 (ePUB) Subjects: LCSH: Music–Philosophy and aesthetics. | Music and philosophy. | Deleuze, Gilles, 1925-1995. | Guattari, Fâelix, 1930-1992. Classification: LCC ML3800 .M888 2017 (print) | LCC ML3800 (ebook) | DDC 781.1– dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016027333 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-1674-6 ePub: 978-1-5013-1676-0 ePDF: 978-1-5013-1675-3 Cover design by Clare Turner Cover image © cornflower/Shutterstock Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

CONTENTS

List of Figures  vii Acknowledgements  viii

Introduction: Musical Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari  Pirkko Moisala, Taru Leppänen, Milla Tiainen and Hanna Väätäinen  1 PART ONE Elaborations  31 1 Unfolding Non-Audist Methodologies in Music Research: Signing Hip Hop Artist Signmark and Becoming Deaf with Music  Taru Leppänen 33 2 A Micropolitics of Becoming-Woman and Moya Henderson’s Rinse Cycle  Sally Macarthur 51 3 Mattering Black Life: Time, The Rhizome and a Gullah-Geechee Politics of Rhythm  Jay Hammond 67 PART TWO Events  85 4 Singing Non-Human-Centric Relational Futures – The Algae Opera as an Assemblage  Milla Tiainen 87 5 Queer Transversal: The Spectacle Adam Lambert  Elizabeth Gould 107 6 ‘A People to Come’ in Himalayan Village Music – A Deleuzian-Guattarian Study of Musical Performance  Pirkko Moisala 129

vi

CONTENTS

PART THREE Experiments  147 7 Experimental Music and the Question of What a Body Can Do  Marie Thompson 149 8 Learning to Listen – Inorganization of the Ear  Janne Vanhanen 169 9 Listening Assemblages: Re-sounding Place and Mapping the Affects of Sound  Michelle Duffy 189 10 Forming Common Notions in a Kinetic Research Collaboration  Hanna Väätäinen 205 Contributors  223 Index  225

LIST OF FIGURES

5.1 Spectacle Adam Lambert  112 5.2 Transversal Relays  115 5.3 Middle Transversal  119 5.4 Queer Transversal  122

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This volume was generated from the research project ‘Deleuzian Music Research’ (2012–2016), which was funded by the Academy of Finland and conducted at the University of Helsinki. We are indebted to the Academy of Finland for giving us the opportunity to immerse in exploring encounters of music, sound and the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. We wish to thank Professor Claire Colebrook, Professor Suzanne Cusick and Professor Jocelyne Guilbault for their support; the contributors of this collection; Sari Miettinen; people involved in the production of this volume from Bloomsbury Publishing, particularly Leah Babb-Rosenfeld; as well as the anonymous readers of the book proposal and manuscript.

Introduction: Musical Encounters with Deleuze and Guattari Pirkko Moisala, Taru Leppänen, Milla Tiainen and Hanna Väätäinen

According to Gilles Deleuze, one of the most influential philosophers of our time, Western frameworks of reasoning have crucially rested on the principles of identity, opposition, analogue and resemblance. In modern Western music cultures including music research, the logics of identity thinking can be detected most readily in the grounding of music in work identities and the figure of the composer–creator prevalent especially in the field of classical music. The way Deleuze conceptualizes encounters, for example, in his book Difference and Repetition (1994: 39–40) opens up another view to the world: encounters regarding contact with something in the world that perplexes existing categorizations and already established ways of being. They are the moments where an object or a process refuses to be immediately recognized in the terms of the already given, as similar or opposed to something familiar. In encounters, a thing can at first only be sensed. Its power to affect, and to make a difference is registered. Consequently, it poses new problems for thought. Considered in this manner, encounters are fundamental because they give us new sensations, experiences, ideas and modes of being. Our aspiration is to initiate such encounters where both Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking and the musical and sounding processes examined in the present volume could reveal revived or hitherto unnoticed aspects and potentialities in each other. In this endeavor, we draw inspiration from previous projects that, while working with Deleuze and Guattari, have explored the power of contemporary art practices in order to invite new possibilities of sensing, conceptualizing and being, instead of just representing or reshuffling already existing realities and meanings (see O’Sullivan 2005; Kontturi 2012).

2

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

The chapters in this collection of essays are about a variety of encounters between musical and sound-related events and the philosophy of Deleuze and his collaborator Félix Guattari, which stresses the primacy of immanence, processuality and variation across all forms of existence. As noted by the cultural theorist Claire Colebrook, ‘immanence … has no outside and nothing other than itself’ (2002: xxiv). For Deleuze and Guattari, immanence means processuality, which has no transcendent and stable foundation. As A Thousand Plateaus (1987), possibly the most significant volume co-authored by Deleuze and Guattari, powerfully exemplifies, everything in existence, all phenomena, thoughts and categories are formed as relations in constant processes of becoming. The challenge this philosophy sets to music and sound studies is this: instead of taking categories, identities or systems – pieces, performances, conventions, communities of music and sound – as given we should examine what kinds of components and forces – practices, ideas, beliefs, materialities, discourses – they are constantly formed and reformed from. The set of essays presented takes the intellectual and political promise entailed by Deleuze and Guattari’s process philosophy seriously when addressing music and sound as becomings – as actors in assemblages and actualizations of potential or what they also call virtual, as yet unactualized, tendencies. The chapters included in the volume relate to cultural studies of music and sound, jazz and popular music studies, ethnomusicology, as well as dance, performance and disability studies. ‘Musical’, in the title of this volume, encompasses a wealth of actions, responses, actors, things, space-times and connections that somehow participate in the construction of music and sound as ongoing practices and ideas: as material, temporal and sociocultural forces. Expanding on Christopher Small’s (1998) concept of musicking – music as a verb – music and sound are understood here as heterogeneous and continuously occurring activities, relationships and thoughts rather than as phenomena foreclosed by any one pre-existing perspective. In the individual essays, this multiplicity of musicking and sounding ranges from new experimental music, reality TV singing competitions and moving human bodies to music-making in a Nepalese village milieu and the inaudible vibrational patterns that underlie the sonorous features and multimodal perception of sounds. This volume particularly examines the methodological implications of Deleuze and Guattari’s work for various kinds of music and sound studies. The methodological practices that the contributors of our volume bring into contact with these thinkers span from musical ethnography to variants of performance analysis, approaches to listening and collaborative research methods. Besides exploring how engagement with Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas advances understandings of the musical phenomena and the situations studied, the chapters also enquire how the research methodologies at play can be reconsidered and taken in emerging new directions in conversation with their thoughts.

INTRODUCTION

3

The volume at hand strives to expand music and sound studies through encounters between the music and sound events studied, the engaged music studies discussions and Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking. The key aim of this book is, then, to demonstrate how the processual Deleuzian-Guattarian philosophy works both as a meta-theory which guides the researcher to think differently, as well as how their concepts – particularly becoming, affect and assemblage – can function as transforming methodological tools in the research process. Deleuzian and Guattarian concepts are transformed into active powers both in analytical and fieldwork processes. Instead of general conceptual exposition where examples mainly serve an illustrative function, we hope to put pronounced emphasis on how instances of sound and music – in media cultures, arts and everyday life – invite concepts and problems from Deleuze and Guattari’s thought, and how their thinking may in turn translate into important, yet situationally attuned, analytical tools. Several articles have this very dynamics of translation as their subject. Thus, the assembling of this volume has been guided throughout by the conviction that the encounters between music, sound, their study and Deleuze and Guattari are co-constitutively relational. The topics explored, the strands of music and sound studies that individual chapters invoke, as well as the insights of Deleuze and Guattari, each move and modulate one another within their mutual relations. Each re-emerges from these relations somewhat renewed, in ways only specific to that relationality and unknown prior to the encounter.

Deleuze and Guattari in music and sound studies Since the 1990s, the work of Deleuze and Guattari has had a widening impact on numerous areas of the human and social sciences. Their thinking was acknowledged significantly more slowly than that of many continental theorists from the same generation, such as Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva or Jean-François Lyotard. Yet it has over the past decades influenced countless developments in film studies (see e.g. Shaviro 1993; Pisters 2003 and 2012; del Rio 2008; Herzog 2010; Väliaho 2010; Hongisto 2015), gender studies and feminist theory (Braidotti 1991, 1994, 2002; Grosz 1995, 2005a, b; Beckman 2013), media studies (Fuller 2007; Parikka 2007; Coleman 2009), cultural, political and ethical theory (Massumi 1992; Braidotti 2006, 2013; Bennett 2010; O’Sullivan 2012), cultural geography (McCormack 2007; Saldanha 2007), art theory (O’Sullivan 2005; Grosz 2008; Manning 2009), education (St. Pierre and Pillow 2000), theatre and performance studies (Cull 2012) and additional fields of the arts and literature.

4

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

The Deleuze Connections series of edited books has from the late 1990s explored Deleuze’s work in relation to an array of research topics and strands including race, queer theory, new technologies and qualitative methodologies in the social sciences and humanities (e.g. Nigianni and Storr 2009; Poster and Savat 2009; Coleman and Ringrose 2013a). Simultaneously, the many introductions to Deleuze’s ontology and concepts (e.g. Goodchild 1996; Marks 1998; Buchanan 2000; Colebrook 2002) and the increasing number of guidebooks on his particular works, in addition to the Deleuze Studies journal published since 2006, demonstrate aspirations of establishing a veritable field of Deleuze scholarship. At least they can be linked to such a tendency. In comparison to the areas listed above, Deleuze- and Guattari-inspired approaches to music and sound began to emerge much later, that is, not until after the mid-2000s. During the past decade, there has however been an expanding growth in music and sound studies examinations elaborating upon and reoriented by the thinking of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari. This holds for several branches of music and sound scholarship. A volume edited by Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda, Deleuze and Music (2004) was the first extensive presentation of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking in connection with music and sound. The chapters in this book written by philosophers and cultural theorists, which focus on explaining key ideas and concepts of Deleuze and Guattari in relation to music, address many musical genres – popular and non-Western music as well as Western art music and jazz. The main area where Deleuze and Guattari-inspired developments have so far occurred encompasses the theory and philosophy of, and analytical approaches to, Western classical music. Sounding the Virtual (2010), a collection of essays edited by Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt, represents one of the first more wide-ranging attempts to bring Deleuze’s thinking to bear on music scholarship. The volume’s contributors consist of musicologists and theorists of Western art music and jazz. This means concentration on the highly specific repertoires and analytic traditions of these areas and on examinations of musical works created by one or few agents, usually the composer or virtuoso musicians. Aspects of musical structure that can be identified in the score have a central position in Gregg Redner’s Deleuzian discussion on film music in his monograph Deleuze and Film Music: Building a Methodological Bridge between Film Theory and Music (2010) that seeks to develop a methodology based upon and combining theories of music and cinema. Elaborating on Deleuze’s writings on the arts, he suggests that ‘while film music is often understood as sound, it is perhaps best understood … as pure sensation’ (23). Deleuze and Guattari’s considerations of music frequently revolve around the repertoires and renowned composers of the Western classical tradition. However, their notion of music is not entirely restricted to structures of musical sounds organized by individual human subjects (Deleuze and

INTRODUCTION

5

Guattari 1987: 299–350). According to Ronald Bogue (2003: 14), they extend the concept in some of their texts by arguing that music is an open structure that permeates and is permeated by the world. In his book Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (2003: 14) Bogue stresses the interconnectedness of corporeal experiences and natural creative processes in Deleuze and Guattari’s conceptualizations of music. He foregrounds their views on the material and rhythmic relationships between music and the cosmos. This collection resonates with these strands of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking since several essays examine the interrelationships between bodily, environmental and milieu-specific processes in various kinds of musical events. In his monograph, Music after Deleuze (2013), Edward Campbell seems to proceed further than much of the research on music, Deleuze and Guattari mentioned above in challenging understandings of music premised on the concept of musical work and other object-based notions. Like in most previous Deleuzian music studies, his main focus lies in Western modernist art music, although the book also touches upon jazz and a couple of non-Western art music traditions. Campbell examines how Deleuzian concepts – such as difference, repetition, assemblage and rhizome – help us to rethink music ‘in a new way, no longer focusing on it as something static, unchanging, eternal, always the same, but as dynamic, changing and always shifting’ (33). He proposes that musical works should be ‘considered in terms of dynamic assemblages of multiple and heterogeneous forces, rhizomatic lines of flight that are deterritorialized and reterritorialized from various milieus’ (164). Campbell thus makes a valuable attempt to shift the concept and ontology of musical work – one of the most prioritized analytical units of musicological studies. In the present collection, the category of musical work is one important element of research among many instead of holding any kind of inherently primary position. At the same time, there are affinities with Campbell’s approach. Our essays, too, interrogate the continual return of difference, of variations, in the practices of performing, experiencing and making music. To engage with Western art music differently through inspiration drawn from Deleuze and Guattari also drives Sally Macarthur’s book Towards a Twenty-First Century Feminist Politics of Music (2010). Expanding on feminist musicology, Macarthur approaches women’s participation in ‘new’ music composition in a novel, affirmative way. Instead of searching for a solution to the continued absence of women’s music in concert halls, she proposes new potentialities for thought and action by exploring ‘how it might become possible to conceive of the field of music practice in a state of flux, that is a non-hierarchical, non-profit making, non-individualistic, multi-differentiated model of interrelation’ (83). In Macarthur’s view (83), this Deleuze- and Guattari-inspired remapping questions the ways in which existing art music practices are learned and endlessly recycled through

6

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

‘deeply entrenched and repetitive actions’. Therewith, it encourages new practices and becomings. In the volume at hand, many of the musical and sounding practices explored are analyzed in states of flux, which, however, does not free them of hierarchies and the formation of individual subjectivities. Nonetheless, these practices display features that problematize ideas of self-enclosed individual subject and previous hierarchical distinctions pertaining to music. Nearly all the chapters explore how Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts both help to engage with aspects underexplored by previous prevalent approaches to music and sound, and actively render the phenomena under inspection unrecognizable through pointing toward freshly emerging dimensions and dynamics within them. In addition, many of the chapters aim to account for such moments at which some aspects of the studied phenomena overflew the already built conceptions of music and sound. However, encounters do not necessarily denote grand revelations or breaks with the past. Even the tiniest variation within our settled and often complacent views of the music, musical and sound, which disturbs the dominance of the same, carries potential for novel ways of relating, thinking and living (cf. Herzog 2010: 206). The purpose of this volume is not to give a comprehensive account on Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking about music. As illustrated, many studies have already contributed to this task. Instead, we aim at rethinking musical and sonic phenomena as well as research methodologies with Deleuze and Guattari and with earlier scholarship concerning their philosophy and music in fresh ways in the sense that we seek to involve the areas of music and sound scholarship outlined above as true participants in these encounters. That is, we do not claim that engagements with Deleuze and Guattari entail a wholesale reconsideration, let alone abandonment, of music studies’ previous concepts and approaches. Rather, the aim is to show how these approaches both expand through the engagements and how they in turn affect the ways Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking can be understood.

Musicking Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts For Deleuze and Guattari, philosophy meant the production of concepts. Within their work, both together and separately, they developed a plenitude of new concepts. Their method of formulating and using concepts readily exemplifies the processuality of their thinking, since they do not provide fixed definitions for any of these conceptualizations. Instead, their concepts acquire various elaborations, senses and contexts of use across their work. In their book What Is Philosophy?, Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 15–16, 19–22, 33–34) insist that each concept should be regarded as

INTRODUCTION

7

a multiplicity. This is because practically all concepts involve several problems or aspects of a problem to which they seek to respond. These aspects may derive from different previous concepts and projects of thinking. At the same time, it is the dynamic interrelations between a concept’s aspects – the ways in which they continue to be evoked and developed when the concept is being used – which give each concept its specific orientation and character. Deleuze and Guattari call this specificity the endoconsistency of concepts. In this introduction, we have chosen to concentrate on three focal concepts of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy as it is with these concepts that the individual chapters of the volume most intensely engage: becoming, affect and assemblage. Even though these are among the most well known and already prolifically explored concepts drawn from their thinking, they remain much less tested within music studies. This is the case especially in regard to the varied strands of music and sound scholarship, from ethnomusicological approaches to queer, feminist and disability theories related to music, which the present collection focuses on. As Claire Colebrook (2005: 1) notes, for Deleuze (and Guattari) concepts ‘do not gather together an already existing set of things (extension)’. Instead of stabilized propositions about reality, they are intensive in the sense of allowing for always further connections to phenomena and ongoing styles of thinking. From this angle, there is still a lot to be learned about the analytical and political powers of becoming, affect and assemblage, or about their several aspects. What these concepts can do remains an openended question, in music studies and beyond. Moreover, given that this volume seeks to address researchers of music and sound who are not yet deeply familiar with Deleuze and Guattari, becoming, affect and assemblage are of high importance since these concepts enfold some of the fundamental concerns and strivings of their thinking. Becoming summarizes Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of reality as non-teleological temporal and qualitative difference. Affect highlights the relational character and beginnings of all existence, which they swear by. Assemblage foregrounds their perception of any areas of reality as vibrantly heterogeneous: as consisting of co-influencing ‘semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 25). The articles of this volume aim to produce, then, new senses with and out of the concepts of becoming, affect and assemblage in relation to diverse musical practices, sonorities and questions. In addition, individual chapters will engage with many further concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s oeuvre – such as the body, Body without Organs, common notions, micropolitics, rhizome and rhythm – whose aspects connect and partly entangle with these three terms. Each of these concepts will be introduced separately in connection to their appearance in the text.

8

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Becoming Becoming is a practically unavoidable notion in Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking. As a concept, it appears both in some of Deleuze’s solo works (e.g. 1990 and 1994) and in their collaborative ventures, especially A Thousand Plateaus (1987). It also interlinks with Deleuze and Guattari’s various other concepts from affect to a plane of immanence. Ultimately, becoming is a premise that arguably saturates their whole ontological project. It connects to their insistence that in order to appreciate the temporal unfolding and related open-endedness of the world, images of thought premised on identity will need to be substituted with those based upon process and difference; that is, becoming. The notion of becoming thus denotes how no two instances of being are identical in the passage of time – an idea that Deleuze draws from Henri Bergson and Friedrich Nietzsche among others. A human body and mind, a plant, a milieu or a musical piece musicked into sounds cannot remain identical with themselves from one moment to the next. There will always be some newness and re-beginnings, some alterations and reconfigurations emerging from the elements and forces both past and present which come together and constitute just that moment. Deleuze and Guattari’s becoming equals, therefore, a repeated occurrence ‘of differential forces’ (Spinks 2005: 83) without definite beginnings and ends, or pre-given beings to which these becomings happen. It signals being as differing or the way identities are recurrently informed and transformed by difference. To cite Deleuze, ‘[r]eturning is being, but only the being of becoming. The eternal return does not bring back “the same”, but returning constitutes the only Same of that which becomes … Such an identity, produced by difference, is determined as “repetition” ’ (1994: 41). When considered, for instance, in relation to the debates and theoreticalmethodological approaches of cultural music studies, becoming suggests some exciting new directions. Cultural studies of music have posed a challenge to various essentialisms. These range from ontological accounts of musical works in the Western classical tradition as self-contained entities supposedly independent in their meanings from sociocultural and interpretive circumstances to views of gender, race, sexuality and other axes of difference as unalterable aspects of human identity. Challenging such assumptions has defined ‘cultural musicology’ ever since the initiatives in the late 1990s to cluster approaches from diverse disciplinary locations under this rubric because of their interest in any music’s culturally contingent formation processes (see e.g. Middleton 2003: 1–8). Thus, these research strands do not need Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking per se in order to question notions of fixed and essential identity. In the wake of poststructuralist and psychoanalytical lines of thought, many of these undertakings have approached identities – whether those of musical pieces, performers or listeners – as dynamic identifications with

INTRODUCTION

9

established constructions of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and so on, or as critical reworking of such constructions (e.g. Kramer 1990, 1997, 1998; McClary 1991, 1992, 2000; Stokes 1994; Frith 1996; Monson 1996; Cusick 1999, 2009; Born and Hesmondhalgh 2000; Askew 2002; Bohlman 2004; Guilbault 2007; Shelemay  2009). Approaches in this vein can be said to resort to general categories behind individual ways of being, even if the categories at stake are conceived as culturally and historically variable rather than as stable essences. Deleuze and Guattari definitely do not deny the tendency of human societies to use generalizing classifications in order to govern reality and categorize human agents and other phenomena. They call this tendency the plane of transcendence (e.g. 1987: 270–271). They also acknowledge the very real socio-political power and hierarchies that such classifications exercise and impose. However, what their notion of becoming proposes is that these classificatory maneuvers are only ever secondary to the primary variation and heterogeneity of the characteristics of which human individuals and collectives, genders, bodies and sexualities, and myriad non-human beings, such as animal individuals, and natural locales, consist. Modes of being don’t derive from general categories so much as become captured within them, only to overflow them again in terms of their features. A single human gendered, sexed and racialized body or subject is always capable of more than what its placing within such categories or reductive stereotypes implies. Translated into a methodological guideline for cultural music and sound studies, as well as ethnomusicology, this facet of becoming encourages increasing attention to all the differences and unpredictabilities that may be noticed in the musical occasions, actors and relations examined. This noticing can be done without an immediate search for such established meanings and positions that the studied instances could be seen to represent, or signify anew. Almost all the essays in this collection are informed by the idea of becoming as open-ended differing. Some of them elaborate on Deleuze and Guattari’s different conceptualizations of becoming more explicitly than others. This is the case with Sally Macarthur’s chapter that engages with the musictheatre work Rinse Cycle (2010) by Australian contemporary composer Moya Henderson. What interests Macarthur in this work are the ways in which its combinations of sonic and visual gags, performers’ corporeal movements, and diverse onstage objects, which do not customarily belong together (for instance a nun’s bonnet, peaches, plums and a chainsaw), evade conventional definitions of femaleness and femininity, although such definitions can be found at the project’s other levels as in Henderson’s program notes. According to Macarthur, the connections between these elements potentially unleash unforeseen formations of theatrical-musical agency, gender and audience experience. She describes the ‘unanticipated understanding of what it is to be woman’ enabled by this music-theatre assemblage with Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of becoming-woman and

10

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

becoming-imperceptible. These terms refer to the multiplying and as yet unknown forms, capacities, lived realities and conceptualized meanings that female, femininity or genders might assume in the future. In his chapter, Janne Vanhanen asks how we can understand listening as a continual process of becoming in the sense of an open relation toward the sounds, vibrations, musical events and sensory world encountered. He enquires how it might be possible to encourage this sort of openness of listening, whereby auditory (and otherwise felt sonic) experiences are not instantly organized into established definitions of music, sound, musical creation and work. Instead, an experiencing subject actively seeks relations with auditory events and sound-making bodies ‘outside its habitual sphere of existence’. This will, in turn, incite the subject to become anew, as it may unlearn its previous modes of listening, feeling and thinking in new tangles of relations. Vanhanen suggests that this pedagogical path beyond the given may be fruitfully explored in connection with experimental music since it stresses ‘indeterminacy, improvisation or process, materiality of the sonic medium and uniqueness of the musical moment’. Using the practices of John Cage and Pauline Oliveros as his interlocutors, Vanhanen formulates the concept of the Inorganized Ear to designate the kinds of listening generative of new ways of musicking and being that he theorizes. Macarthur’s and Vanhanen’s approaches point to a key aspect of becoming, namely, the way in which becomings, in Deleuze and Guattari’s scheme, always occur from within relations. Modes of being do not selfdiffer in a solipsistic fashion. Rather, becomings occur on what Deleuze (1994: 246–247, 257–259) calls after philosopher Gilbert Simondon the pre-individual level. On this level, the characteristics and capacities of actors and things configure anew within moving interrelations outside settled subject and object positions. The pre-individual concerns intensive changes in the involved entities’ relations and potentialities to become. These then result in actual – extensive – changes in their manners of being. Hence, becoming is about constant fluctuation between pre-individual relationality and what might come to pass – which Deleuze and Guattari call the virtual – and the ways that things, for instance human subjects, actually re-arise as separable beings from encounters which shape their potential. (See also Massumi 2009.) Deleuze and Guattari highlight the occurrence of preindividual relationality between varied realms and scales of being: human, animal, vegetal, artifactual, technological and so on. The relationality intrinsic in becoming is central to another, more openly politicized, aspect of this notion. For Deleuze and Guattari, becomings worthy of the name must act to unsettle established dominant modes of being. As they state in Chapter  10 of A Thousand Plateaus focused on becoming, ‘there is no becoming-man’ (1987: 292). What this refers to is that man – especially the European, white and adult male subject – occupies a dominant societal position supported by a long history of exploiting humans

INTRODUCTION

11

and non-humans different from him. Man has also been elevated into the primary model of subjectivity and humanness in most Western systems of thought. Therefore, he cannot provide impetus for multiple differences that would be appreciated in their own terms rather than as deviations from one norm. The production of such differences must happen in relation to ‘minoritarian’ terms. Deleuze and Guattari’s (291–292) minoritarian does not signal minorities in the numerical sense, but such beings and groups that hold a non-dominant, marginalized or subversive place within the given setting. In order for any of us to become, we must consequently enter into relations with terms that represent ways of existing beyond categories prioritized in hierarchical binaries and norms which exclude variegated alternatives. For Deleuze and Guattari (233–309) minoritarian modes of being range from things associated with women and femininity to animals and other nature. They also include, for example, ethnicities and sexualities outside the governing norms. Deleuze and Guattari (258) insist that becomings in relation to minorities cannot be achieved by mimicking them, fantasizing about them or by trying to appropriate their identity. They are about seeking such provisional interrelations with these terms that affect and may, however slightly, challenge our normalized, possibly privileged positions. While always shaped by chance, becomings should also aim to enhance the implicated minoritarian terms’ possibilities for being. The concept of minoritarian resonates with many discussions concerning the relations of the self and the other, and the center and the periphery, which ethnomusicologists and feminist and cultural music scholars have significantly contributed to (see e.g. Barz and Cooley 1997; Agawu 2007; Aubert 2007; Moisala 2008; Koskoff 2014). As a consequence, this dimension of becoming could be productively tested and extended in the research practices of ethnomusicology and musical ethnography because of the nuanced ways in which scholars in these fields have considered the relationships between researchers and research participants, as well as between dominant and less powered cultures and agents. In the present collection of essays, Taru Leppänen elaborates on the idea of becoming as movement toward minoritarian terms and proliferating differences. Her chapter examines the music-making practices of the Finnish Deaf hip hop artist Marko Vuoriheimo, aka Signmark. Through engaging with these practices, Leppänen encourages change in some of the founding assumptions and hierarchies concerning musical authorship and phenomena that are held in music scholarship and copyright law alike. These are linked with reserving the production and experiencing of music mainly to hearing or non-Deaf people. Signmark’s music-making, which involves signed lyrics, other body movements, the vibrations of the sound he feels and the technologies that co-compose the sounds and vibrations, exemplifies, however, the manifold roles and relations through which Deaf people can participate in the creation of music. Leppänen asserts that music and sound studies should

12

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

move beyond audism, that is, approaches that privilege hearing, and explore increasingly the multifaceted and shared nature of music-making that Deaf peoples’ activities foreground. She proposes that this move can be pursued through processes of becoming-Deaf, whereby the perspectives of a Deaf or a Hearing person shift as they relate to specificities and forces attached to Deaf people.

Affect One of the key concepts that interconnect with becoming in Deleuze and Guattari’s work is affect. The term does not within their thought denote emotion, although emotional states and experiences may be one outcome of affect (see Massumi 2002: 35–36). Rather, affect is a basic dimension in their relational and processual ontology. It refers, first, to encounters between two or more entities in which they influence each other’s states of being. Second, affect means the transitions from one state and capacity of being to another, somehow altered state that entities undergo as a result of such encounters. In his book Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1988), in which he elaborates on Dutch seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza’s theories, Deleuze terms the first of these aspects, the relationship between the affecting and affected entities, as affection (49). The transitions and differences that these relationships incite in the relating terms Deleuze calls affects. In both of these senses, affect clearly comes close to DeleuzianGuattarian becoming. Their understanding of affect encompasses changes that concern capacities to relate, act, respond, feel and experience. They also concern shifts in an entity’s potential to become in as yet unknown ways in the future. (See e.g. Massumi 2002: 9 and 15; Shouse 2005.) What the affect is like and how it is perceived by the affected entities themselves – for instance, how it is a change in both body and mind in the case of humans – depends on their existing constitution and pasts. Namely, as with becoming, affections can, according to Deleuze and Guattari, occur between heterogeneous terms stretching from fellow humans to humans, non-human animals, technologies, natural milieus, musical sounds and so on. They (1987: 260; Deleuze 1988: 123–128) call these diverse entities bodies. Instead of signifying only individual human organic bodies, the body can in these theorizations be any such configuration whose elements interrelate with each other in specific ways and which displays capacities to affect and be affected. For example, a group of music-making people, instruments and sonorities could be understood as an ensemble of mutually affecting bodies, or even as one body composed of various terms and their relations. To the extent that musical situations are approached as affective relations between entities, one important task befalling research is to enquire how different bodies are affected by each other in particular practices, times and places.

INTRODUCTION

13

Do the given relations expand and enrich or diminish and obstruct the involved terms’ capacities and potential? How can we tell? Deleuze and Guattari’s views of affect have already begun to inspire renewed approaches to music and sound as expressive, social and bodilysensorial processes. This is exemplified by Anahid Kassabian’s (2013) study on ubiquitous listening, which argues that the various kinds of often technologically mediated presences of music in our everyday lives have led to diverse modes of listening, attention and affective responses to music. The concept of affect is elaborated especially in the collection of essays Sound, Music, Affect (2013a) edited by Marie Thompson and Ian Biddle. Particularly, the latter work comes close to this volume in reaching beyond the focus on signification typical of previous cultural music and sound studies while engaging with Deleuze and Guattari’s and Baruch Spinoza’s notions of affect and affection. The difference between this volume and ours lies in diverging conceptions of music and sound. While Sound, Music, Affect (e.g. Thompson and Biddle 2013b: 10–12) approaches music predominantly as a sonorous phenomenon, the present volume seeks to further extend understandings of what or how music is by emphasizing its multisensory, other than aural, not yet actualized virtual and vibratory beyond the human characteristics. It is easy to imagine additional productive transactions between DeleuzianGuattarian theorizations of affect and several branches of music and sound research, such as musical performance studies both in ethnomusicology and cultural musicology (e.g. Kisliuk 2001; Cook 2013), everyday music (DeNora 2000), multi-disciplinary engagements with music, sound, the body and the senses (e.g. Austern 2002; Finnegan 2003; Eidsheim 2011; Tiainen 2013) and music and emotion studies (e.g. Berger 2009; Juslin and Sloboda 2011). In this collection, Marie Thompson sketches a new approach to experimental music practices inspired by Spinoza’s conceptions of the body and Deleuze’s appropriations of them. Thompson suggests that much experimental music can be understood to explore Spinoza’s famous axiom according to which ‘no one has yet determined what a body can do’ (E II p2). This is because the capacities of bodies vary in relation to the other bodies they come into contact with. Thompson argues that while the performing and listening bodies have been central themes in cultural and feminist musicology, Spinoza and Deleuze’s non-anthropocentric notion of the body allows an increased understanding of how also other-than-human elements, such as the traditional and newly made instruments and media technologies of experimental music praxis, so affect and are affected by music-making. This encourages a move beyond the inadequate binary between active musicking subjects and passive musical objects. While discussing the projects of American composer Alvin Lucier, improvising cellist Okkyung Lee and composer and media artist Yasunao Tone, Thompson investigates

14

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

the audio-affective capacities that the instruments, media technologies and human actors of these examples attain within their mutual relations. In her chapter, Pirkko Moisala elaborates on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of affect in order to examine how the musical performances of the Āma Samuha (Mothers’ Society) in the Nepalese village of Klinu expand their participants’ powers to act, bodily experiences and the wider gender system and social life of the village. As Moisala proposes, the partakers of these performances – both the women who sing and play and the auditorspectators – are drawn into their specific space and time. This re-embodies, reorients and re-ontologizes the participants. What the concept of affect helps Moisala to highlight is how these performances are not mere vehicles for the renegotiation of the performing women’s socioeconomic status in the village society. It is the performances themselves that carry transformative potential with regard to the whole village milieu. Their relations between sounds, environments, human bodies and minds, and non-human materialities, such as musical instruments and other paraphernalia of the occasions, create new expressive embodiments and possibilities for feeling and thinking for those involved.

Assemblage As one of the most important terms in Deleuze and Guattari’s oeuvre, assemblage undoubtedly opens up a key path for promoting Deleuzian-Guattarian methodologies for the cultural, ethnographic and ethnomusicological studies of music and sound. According to Ian Buchanan (2000: 120), Deleuze and Guattari use the concept of assemblage to reconfigure the staple sociological and philosophical issue of the relationship between the human and its world. As cultural theorist Brian Massumi writes, not only individuals and the society but the subject and the social are ‘strictly simultaneous and consubstantial’ (2002: 68ff). An assemblage can be understood as any number of components, things, elements and aspects – forces, materialities, discourses, affects, expressions – forming an interacting and continuously transforming complex whole which does not have a permanent identity or an organization. Deleuze and Guattari define assemblage as the ‘very constellation of singularities and traits deduced from the flow – selected, organized, stratified in such a way as to converge … artificially and naturally’ (1987: 406). It is a ‘multiplicity which is made up of heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them’ (Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 69). Within music and sound studies, the concept of assemblage encourages the examination of music and sounds as emergent, fluidly moving events which engage a multiplicity of social, cultural, bodily and material forces and elements. From this point of view, the concept of assemblage

INTRODUCTION

15

obviously has relevance to and may inspire reconsiderations of the concept of culture. As the study of music as culture, ethnomusicology has favored anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s (1973) definition of culture as shared patterns of behavior and thoughts that are formed within a long period of time, socially controlled and individually applied. Even though the history of Western art music has been examined from the social perspective since it was first studied, musicology was much slower to recognize the thorough impact of cultural factors in music and music-making. Considering Anglo-American musicology, it was famously scholars such as Lawrence Kramer (1990, 1996), Susan McClary (1991), Rose Subotnik (1995) and Richard Leppert (1995) who initiated and reconfigured the idea of musical meaning as music’s cultural signification in producing what can be called the cultural turn in musicology. By claiming that music’s cultural meanings are not innate, but something it accrues in its constant encounters with listeners embedded in specific psychological and sociocultural frameworks, the approaches at stake shifted the views of classical music’s ontology from pre-given artworks to a dynamic signifying process. Today – as popular music scholar Richard Middleton points out in the introduction to The Cultural Study of Music (Clayton et al. 2012) – the cultural approach to music has become so routine in all kinds of music and sound studies that it may be instrumentalized to death (1–2). This notwithstanding, due to the complexity and multidimensionality of today’s cultural spheres it has become more and more necessary to carefully situate the studies of music and sound on particular localities and times. A particularly successful way of situating music and musicking as a relational event has been theorized by ethnomusicologist Jocelyne Guilbault (2005). Her concept of audible entanglements – which to us effectively echoes the Deleuzian-Guattarian assemblage – examines ‘sites, moments, and modes of enunciation articulated through musical practices. So, far from being “merely” musical, audible entanglements  …  assemble social relations, cultural expressions, and political formulations’ (20–21, original emphasis). The Deleuzian-Guattarian concept of assemblage may adjust her approach a little further by possibly observing a wider range of likely components, such as different kinds of materialities and non-human elements, while it stresses the necessity to examine what is produced by the entanglements, therefore asking what this assemblage does and what it makes possible. Thus, the Deleuzian-Guattarian concept of assemblage provides a useful tool of thought for identifying the complexity of elements, processes and forces involved in music and sound events. The concept of assemblage may also advance understandings of performances of any kinds of music, also in such music cultures that are based strongly upon notation, that is, on detailed written production instructions and related notions of musical work. In these approaches, performances, in the sense of both sound production and associated activities, are not understood as reproduction of pre-existing

16

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

work identities, meanings or completed musical parameters. They are examined as occasions that generate meaning, sociality and relationships specific to their own unfolding (see e.g. Cook 2003, 2013; Tiainen 2012). As Nicholas Cook proposes in his extensive inquiry of music as performance, Beyond the Score (2013: 249, 324, 336), in music studies that aim to value performances as performances, everything that figures in or seems to affect a performance potentially counts. Deleuze-Guattari’s concept of assemblage provides these approaches with fresh nuanced means of grasping what dimensions of reality can indeed count within performances.1 The dimensions of assemblage theorized by Deleuze and Guattari as well as by many scholars following their path may therefore help to develop increasingly fine-grained ways of examining the processes involved in musicking and sounding. Importantly, the various components of the assemblage relate with each other and they are mutually catalyzing while they also maintain certain autonomy, so the components may be detached from it and plugged into different assemblages. As Deleuze and Parnet write, ‘[t]he assemblage’s only unity is that of a co-functioning’ (1987: 69). An assemblage can be examined from the perspective of its multiple effects, be they, for instance, aesthetic, bodily, constructive or consumptive. Drawing on the creation of a sound art piece crafted in response to children’s feelings about their everyday places, Michelle Duffy’s chapter in this volume seeks to understand how we make sense of what we hear. Duffy notes that conceptualizing the sound art piece Images of Home and its listeners in terms of a listening assemblage facilitates an important shift in considering the workings of sound. Rather than a focus on what sounds mean or represent, she suggests that the notion of assemblage ‘allows us to acknowledge that the creative actions of composition give coherence to sound while simultaneously destabilizing and opening up what meanings may be attributed’. This inherent paradox allows us our varied and multiple entries into the sound world. The same line of thought pertains to the relationship of music and sounds with culture and society. Drawing loosely from Deleuze, music anthropologist Georgina Born has used the concept of musical assemblage to address ‘the way that music’s mediation take[s] a number of forms – social, corporeal, discursive, visual, technological and so on – which cohere into constellations that endure and take particular historical shapes’ (2013b: 33f). According to her, the notion of assemblage ‘suggests that music has no essence but a plural and distributed socio-material

The previously underexplored impact of Deleuze’s philosophy of immanent processuality and difference on understandings of performance has already been examined in the wider field of performance studies. See, for instance, Cull (2009, 2012). Musical and sonic performances do not figure prominently in these examinations. 1

INTRODUCTION

17

being, enabling music to be cognized as a constellation of mediations of heterogeneous kinds’ (2012: 268). Aiming at expanding the previous conceptions of the social aspect of music, she identifies four different planes of social mediation that enter musical assemblages in dynamic ways. She asserts that, ‘such an analytics of social mediation makes it possible to distinguish between different degrees and kinds of co-present and virtual sociality, as well as of individuation and aggregation, privatization and public-isation afforded by today’s ramifying musico- or sonic-socialtechnological assemblages’ (32). The Deleuzian-Guattarian assemblage is not only a territorial gesture but also a performative practice which carves out new routes of thinking. Deleuze and Guattari use the concepts of de- and reterritorialization to grasp the constant processes of transformation. According to them, social structures and processes undergo constant movements of territorialization, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Basically, every assemblage is territorial – and includes processes of territorializing – because they are made of decoded fragments. A territory ‘ensures and regulates’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 353) and holds together the heterogeneous elements. By territorialization they are referring to acts of organizing phenomena into relatively stable forms that are differentiated from their outsides. However, ‘[t]erritories are not fixed for all time, but are always being made and unmade, reterritorializing and deterritorializing’ (Macgregor Wise 2005: 79); they are ‘as inseparable from deterritorialization as the code from decoding’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 556). Processes of deterritorializing act toward dissolving assemblages which may gain new forms through this process. Thus, lines of deterritorialization cut across assemblages as at their heart are the virtual machines of mutation and deterritorialization, which form their most profound ‘inner nature’ (Patton 2006: 35). Deterritorialization in its turn refers to movements by which one leaves a territory while it also is inseparable from the processes of reterritorializing. We may take Deleuze and Guattari’s assertions that ‘[t]he first concrete rule for assemblages is to discover what territoriality they envelope and that ‘[i]t is necessary to ascertain the content and the expression of each assemblage’ (1987: 555) as methodological instructions. One can add the need to pay attention to the diverse forces of deterritorializing taking place in an assemblage which enable the formation of new connections. Social theorist Paul Patton (2006: 28) suggests that Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between two kinds of assemblages. There are extensive molar assemblages that are unifiable, totalizable and organizable. Patton characterizes them as arborescent, tree-like systems that are ‘hierarchical systems with centres of significance and subjectification’ (1987: 16). In music, one can identify such kind of systems, for example, in music schools, conservatories, orchestras, musical works and on different levels of music industry and administration. On the other hand, there are molecular

18

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

assemblages that consist of intensities and differences not settled into distinct and recognizable categories. These are rhizomic assemblages that lack unity and embody a fluid organization, and they operate by variation, expansion, offshoots and conquest. Thus, rhizomatic assemblages are defined ‘by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities’ (9). For instance, improvisatory musical performances and internet music communities illuminate such rhizomatic elements. Patton (2006) notes, however, that molar assemblages with tree-like structures and molecular assemblages with rhizomatic systems should not be separated from each other as a dualism but, instead, ‘tree structures have the rhizomatic offshoots and rhizomes have their own points of arborescence’ (30). Thus, instead of being a description of ‘real-life’ structure, an assemblage is a conceptual tool for mapping musical events and settings. Furthermore, assemblage allows us to grasp musical realities and situations in specific contexts without assuming, in advance, a particular set of logics that determines their form. Different kinds of both rhizomatic and tree-like assemblages – and assemblages combining both kinds of elements – can be detected in every dimension of different kinds of sonic events, in musicking people, playing techniques, musical ensembles, performances and everyday situations, soundscapes, sound processings, digital networks and global markets. As an anti-structural concept, assemblage allows the researcher to approach emergence and multiplicity, and the decentered and the ephemeral in musical events (Marcus and Saka 2006). It also encourages the observation of music’s multiple simultaneous forms of existence. One aspect of assemblage thinking is the way it enables the acknowledgment of the active agency of matter and non-human entities or forces. Echoing this, some chapters in this volume tentatively connect Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts to the burgeoning fields of new materialist and posthuman(ist) thinking. In her chapter, which focuses on the complexly collaborative vocal music, performance and media art project The Algae Opera (premièred in 2012), Milla Tiainen argues that the concept of assemblage may help in analyzing the growing nonanthropocentric and environmentalist approaches in Western performing arts. With its co-constitutive relations between an opera singer, the algae, a new biotechnological device and questions of ecological sustainability and future food economies, The Algae Opera both exemplifies and expands these tendencies. Tiainen further discusses that through its several aspects, the concept of assemblage may provide methodological support for reconsidering the nature and powers of many kinds of musical – or other arts and everyday – performances. In particular, she stresses the need to understand the notion of relations of exteriority integral to the concept of assemblage, as well as the ways in which assemblages act simultaneously

INTRODUCTION

19

as machinic assemblages of material elements and processes and as collective assemblages of enunciation. Deleuze and Guattari strive not to privilege the becomings of human existence at the expense of the wider living and inorganic world, which has been a recurring tendency in Western philosophy. Their thoughts seek to acknowledge the varied and mutually different ways in which diverse things exist as a process, ranging from human bodies, concepts and languages to, for example, micro-organisms and animal species or individuals. Due to both scientific-technological advancements and ecological crises the term ‘nonhuman’ that we use in this volume, as well as other terms referring to the same direction, such as more than human and posthuman, currently have broad currency in so-called posthumanist – or posthuman-centric – research  that is burgeoning in many disciplines of the human and social sciences (e.g.  Haraway 2007; Wolfe 2009; Bennett 2010; Braidotti 2013; Grusin 2015). Cultural theorist Erin Manning (2013) uses the term ‘more than human’ about similar types of forces with tendencies of their own. By more than human, she means the embeddedness of human beings in the forces  of the becoming of their environment. Manning  advises, ‘[g]o beyond the human and see the more than human coursing in speciations that exceed the mortal body to include different speeds and slownesses that cut across it, infinitely’ (146). The term ‘posthuman’ is also used by Deleuzian feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti (2013) who similarly refers to a form of subjectivity and to an ethics, which ‘rests on an enlarged sense of inter-connection between self and others’ (190). By this she means a sense of  community, ‘which includes one’s territorial or environmental interconnections’ (190). For her, becoming-posthuman ‘is a process of redefining one’s sense of attachment and connection to a shared world’ (193). Previous music studies have mapped various ways in which music relates with the non- or more than human. To point out some examples regarding the participation of nature’s sounds in music, their role in the creation of musique concrete and other postmodernist music has been analyzed by a number of musicologists. In ethnomusicology, the role of the sounds of ecological surroundings in music and musical assessments has been acknowledged since Steven Feld’s renowned study on Kaluli musicking (1990) and his attendant concept of acoustemology (1996). The Deleuzian-Guattarian notion of non-human becomings that we use also has connections with the growing research strand of eco/ethno/musicology (Guy 2009; Allen 2011; Pedelty 2012). When referring to the non-human, political theorist Jane Bennett (2010) uses the concepts of vital materiality, vital materialism and vibrant matter in her analysis of non-human forces operating in the human body, in human artifacts and in nature. By drawing from Deleuze and Guattari’s and many other philosophers’ thinking, she examines how ‘political responses to

20

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

public problems [would] change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies’ (viii). By vitality she means ‘the capacity of things … not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’ (viii). In the present volume, Marie Thompson, for example, writes about this kind of vitality of sound making things by drawing attention to the generative, creative potential of the material and the non-human in experimental music. One of Thompson’s examples, Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire (1977), is a piece in which a wire extended across a large room, can be made to play itself in situations, where ‘the forces of the milieu cause the wire to vibrate in a particular manner’. In a Spinozan-Deleuzian framework, the relations or affects of which the wire is capable generate music in Lucier’s piece.

New ethics and politics for music and sound studies Power, ethics and politics can be understood as both limiting and empowering potentials. For instance, cultural studies of music have mainly focused on analyzing and deconstructing subordinating and repressive manifestations of power even though power has also been analyzed as a generative phenomenon. In addition to approaching power as a restrictive force, the Deleuzian-Guattarian approach insists on affirmative politics (Braidotti 2013) in investigations of processes of musicking. It is ‘as much a mapping of what is impossible, what becomes stuck or fixed, as it is of flux and flow’ (Coleman and Ringrose 2013b: 9). Elaborating on this, the present book conceives the task of music studies to be about discovering what knowledges and identities related to music we may have unnecessarily fixed, who or what these stabilized formations may prioritize or marginalize and what as yet unrecognizable processes might be flowing within phenomena we thought we had grasped, which will propel our research approaches and engagements with music into reinvigorated becomings. When musickings are explored as relational events, the logic of fairly stable recognition behind ‘knowing music’ may be complemented or replaced by ‘noticing musicking’, to use a notion coined by Kathleen Stewart (2007). The chapters in this anthology give some examples of how noticing stands not for finding the repeatable, more or less stable in musicking, but for opening up to the singularities that might change our relations with and thoughts about what musickings are and do. Thus, this anthology suggests that the premises of singularity and always partly unpredictable becomings provided by the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari inspire an

INTRODUCTION

21

epistemological and ontological shift from knowing music – being able to recognize and read its codes – into noticing musickings in motion. Elizabeth Gould concentrates on this in her chapter on unpredictable becomings within musical performance in order to show how a performing body may exceed and destabilize social, cultural and political requirements. She analyzes Adam Lambert’s performances in the television show American Idol in connection with questions of gender and sexuality. Lambert’s musical persona resisted the spectacle’s heteronormativity and actualized queer subjectivities by affirming and intensifying sexual differences in his performances. Deleuzian-Guattarian thinking helps Gould to analyze Lambert’s musicking not only in terms of queer identities, but rather as ‘[h]omosexual desire … distributed and mobilized otherwise’ (Conley 2009: 25, 26). Identities are, in this approach, not stable or identically repeatable categories but in processes of queer becoming. The issue at stake in noticing musickings is about ethics and politics: what kinds of ways of noticing musickings can increase the capacities of our bodies and ideas and what ways would diminish them? Creating new possibilities for thinking and action is a central issue in Hanna Väätäinen’s chapter in this volume that explores movements as analytical tools in music and dance research. She and her collaborator Anneli Tiilikainen have developed a way of creating new concepts by using contact improvisation. Väätäinen shows ‘how creating concepts together with a participant through dance can be an accessible and political way of doing research’. Her research methodology modifies significantly the more conventional ways of doing research by democratizing the knowledge production processes. She makes the Deleuzian-Guattarian thought accessible to her collaborator by using not only reading and writing but also movement as a tool for doing research. Deleuzian-Guattarian music studies, thus, continue the same line of thought with previous music studies which have aimed at transforming  – and in fact, have transformed – the ways we understand and approach music (e.g. McClary 1991; Citron 1993; Cusick 1994; Cook 1998, 2013; Clayton et  al. 2012; Born 2013a). Susan McClary is usually credited for shaking the ‘certainty of knowing’ within Western art-music culture by claiming that we (musicologists) are ‘no longer sure what MUSIC is’ (1991: 19). However, ethnomusicologists have never been able to enjoy such certainty of understanding music in the first place. Since initiating the study of music in and as a culture which, until the 1980s, most often meant the study of distant cultures, it has been customary for ethnomusicologists to ask what music is in this culture, for these people, and in this particular context, rather than essentializing music as something known as a priori. Ethnomusicological studies have examined what music accomplishes in society and for the people it affects, and what it is that organized sounds – in the Western world called music – do in various situations.

22

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

The processual view to music has characterized ethnomusicology, which has studied musics as a process of making music, in performance, as performances of culture, and as cultural processes. On the musicological side of music studies, Suzanne Cusick suggested in her groundbreaking essay ‘Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/ Body Problem’ (1994) reconsiderations of music beyond the work or object-form by stressing music’s inseparability from musical performers’ actions and mobile corporealities. Music, here, became a process of occurring as sounds and expression that relates inextricably to musicians’ coordinated, yet always newly enacted bodily techniques which are interpreted as signalling gendered traits and hierarchies, for example. Nicholas Cook (1998, 2013) has, in turn, strongly promoted the study of musical works as performances, opposing the view of performances as mere reproductions of supposedly pre-existing works, which has not allowed room for the creativity of performance occasions and makers. Particularly, his way of assembling components of media technology into the study of musical performances has emphasized the need to update musicological approaches so that they will be able to examine music as a multiply mediated cultural stream. The political and ethical endeavors in Deleuzian-Guattarian studies connect closely with the so-called ethical turn in the humanities (Garber et  al. 2000). For instance, in this volume Jay Hammond’s ethnographic engagement with multifaceted artist, jazz drummer and intellectual David Pleasant focuses on race as produced simultaneously through discourse and the body. Deleuzian thought provides a fruitful approach to antiracist scholarship because it seeks to understand race through materiality, the body and creative expression. Hammond shows that time is not only a musical, but also a political issue. Furthermore, in the study of music, the political and ethical turn means creating approaches and conceptualizations that are not preconditioned in terms of any single musical system and that do not force music and musickings into fixed research models, but strive to approach their immanence, also allowing new becomings to arise. In Deleuzian-Guattarian terms, ethics also means maximizing the possibilities or potentialities of musicking through examining it from different kinds of minoritarian vantage points. In this book, these vantage points include for instance disabled (vis-à-vis able), non-Western (vis-à-vis Western) music cultures and d/Deaf (vis-à-vis Hearing) cultures. These minoritarian starting points allow the expansion of the very concept and ontology of music, both within Deleuzian discourses and in those of music research. This enables music and sound scholars to further advance understandings of the diversity of musickings as well as to re-conceptualize both musicking and music studies as forms of deeply ethical and political practices.

INTRODUCTION

23

From knowing to noticing In his introduction to The Cultural Study of Music, Richard Middleton writes, ‘It is hard to delineate with precision all that these various trajectories [of the cultural studies of music] have in common, beyond a position against pure musical autonomy’ (2003: 2). We nonetheless question if the still popular discussions about music as text – albeit as socio-culturally conditioned rather than autonomous – carry remnants of autonomy philosophy or ideology precisely through continuing to presume music as a somehow distinct substance. Similarly, we wonder if ethnomusicology, ‘the study of people making music’ (Titon 1997: 87–100) could be enriched by focusing more closely on the immanent becomings in musical events. Furthermore, can we, music scholars, in the current societal, technological and ecological realities afford to demarcate music as a predominantly or even autonomously human affair? Might we, instead, need updated environmental understandings of music – understandings which are strongly attuned to twenty-first-century realities while basing themselves on the interconnectivity of both the human and not so obviously human processes? This anthology suggests that the premises of immanence, processuality, relationality and always partly unpredictable becoming provided by the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari inspire an epistemological and ontological shift from knowing music – being able to recognize and read its codes – into noticing music and sounds in motion. As argued above, in Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking the role of concepts is not to represent pre-existing reality, as concepts are not for stating that which already exists but their task is to bring about new connections and new possibilities for thinking and action. Concomitantly, in the music research inspired by Deleuze and Guattari, the task of concepts is not to represent or imitate pregiven musical realities. The chapters in this anthology give some examples of how noticing processes involving music and sound through the lenses of Deleuzian-Guattarian concepts stands not for finding the repeatable, more or less stable in them, but for opening up to the singularities that might change our relations with and thoughts about what music and sounds can do. Furthermore, some chapters in this volume seek to expand understandings of music, sound or their becoming beyond the sonic and the auditory. When music and sound are regarded as actualizations within assemblages of variegated relating elements, it also becomes important to think about vibrations, pre-conscious sensations, shifts in bodily potential and the agential capacities of instruments or other non-human entities. Unlike many of the previous Deleuzian music studies, the book at hand mobilizes encounters between Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking and cultural, ethnomusicological and ethnographic studies of music and sound, as well

24

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

as queer musicology. While some chapters do investigate such experimental music practices that can be located within Western art music, most of them concentrate on a host of different musical realms and activities. These include Nepalese indigenous music, Anglo-American popular music and jazz, rap and the music-making practices of the Deaf, sound and performance art, and movement improvisation. As a corollary, the encounters – or co-transforming transactions – that this book seeks to bring about between Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking and music research invoke a range of research themes and methodological choices that have not been the focus of previous Deleuze- and Guattari-informed music research. The themes and ways of rethinking them stretch from identity, musical meaning and authorship to the body, materiality and musical performance. In addition to extending the range of research topics and practices re-examined with Deleuze and Guattari, our collection reviews music – of any kinds – as processual becomings rife with dynamic interrelations between sounds and vibrations, bodies, cultural and material settings, political dynamics and more, instead of conceiving it through object-oriented metaphors. Deleuze and Guattari’s thoughts push approaches to music and sound beyond such long-term dominant paradigms as identity thinking, the privileging of signification and representation, and the centrality of the human subject. Their concepts inspire the study of musicking and sounding as compositions of elements affected by their mutual relations and processes of becoming. While this book is written to move music and sound studies, Deleuze and Guattari’s work is also musicked; it starts to become with music, sounds and their research.

References Agawu, K. (2007), Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions, New York: Routledge. Allen, A. S. (2011), ‘Ecomusicology: Ecocriticism and Musicology’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 64 (2): 391–394. Askew, K. (2002), Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Aubert, L. (2007), The Music of the Other: New Challenges for Ethnomusicology in a Global Age, Farnham: Ashgate. Austern, L. P. ed. (2002), Music, Sensation and Sensuality, New York: Routledge. Barz, G. F. and T. J. Cooley, eds (1997), Shadows in the Field: New Perspective for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beckman, F. (2013), Between Desire and Pleasure: A Deleuzian Theory of Sexuality, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press. Berger, H. (2009), Stance: Ideas about Emotion, Style, and Meaning for the Study of Expressive Culture, Wesleyan: Wesleyan University Press.

INTRODUCTION

25

Bogue, R. (2003), Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts, London: Routledge. Bohlman, P. (2004), The Music of European Nationalism: Cultural Identity and Modern History, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Born, G. (2012), ‘Music and the Social’, in M. Clayton, T. Herbert and R. Middleton (eds), The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edn, 261–274, London: Routledge. Born, G., ed. (2013a), Music, Sound and Space. Transformation of Public and Private Experience, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Born, G. (2013b), ‘Introduction – Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private Experience’, in G. Born (ed.), Music, Sound and Space. Transformations of Public and Private Experience, 1–71, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Born, G. and D. Hesmondhalgh, eds (2000), Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation and Appropriation in Music, Berkeley: University of California Press. Braidotti, R. (1991), Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy, Cambridge: Polity. Braidotti, R. (1994), Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, New York: Columbia University Press. Braidotti, R. (2002), Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2006), Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, Cambridge: Polity Press. Braidotti, R. (2013), The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity Press. Buchanan, I. (2000), Deleuzism: A Metacommentary, Durham: Duke University Press. Buchanan, I. and M. Swiboda, eds (2004), Deleuze and Music, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Campbell, E. (2013), Music after Deleuze, London: Bloomsbury. Citron, M. (1993), Gender and the Musical Canon, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clayton, M., T. Herbert and R. Middleton, ed. (2012), The Cultural Study of Music, a Critical Introduction, 2nd edn, New York and London: Routledge. Colebrook, C. (2002), Understanding Deleuze, Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin. Colebrook, C. (2005), ‘Introduction’, in A. Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary, 1–6, New York: Columbia University Press. Coleman, R. (2009), The Becoming of Bodies: Girls, Images, Experience, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Coleman, R. and J. Ringrose (2013a), Deleuze and Research Methodologies, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Coleman, R. and J. Ringrose (2013b), ‘Introduction: Deleuze and Research Methodologies’, in R. Coleman and J. Ringrose (eds), Deleuze and Research Methodologies, 1–22, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Conley, V. A. (2009), ‘Thirty-six Thousand Forms of Love: The Queering of Deleuze and Guattari’, in C. Nigianni and M. Storr (eds), Deleuze and Queer Theory, 24–36, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cook, N. (1998), Analysing Musical Multimedia, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cook, N. (2003), ‘Music as Performance, in Martin Clayton (ed.), The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, 204–214. New York and London: Routledge.

26

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Cook, N. (2013), Beyond the Score. Music as Performance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cull, L., ed. (2009), Deleuze and Performance, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cull, L. (2012), Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Cusick, S. G. (1994), ‘Feminist Theory, Music Theory, and the Mind/Body Problem’, Perspectives of New Music, 32 (1): 8–27. Cusick, S. (1999), ‘On Musical Performances of Gender and Sex’, in E. Barkin, L. Hamessley and B. Boretz (eds), Audible Traces: Gender, Identity, and Music, 25–48, Zürich: Carciofoli Verlagshaus. Cusick, S. (2009), Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Pres. del Rio, E. (2008), Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, G. (1988), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester and C. Stivale, C. V. Boundas (ed.), New York: Columbian University. Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and C. Parnet (1987), Dialogues, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam. London: Athlone. DeNora, T. (2000), Music in Everyday Life, Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press. Eidsheim, N. (2011), ‘Sensing Voice: Materiality and the Lived Body in Singing and Listening’, Senses & Society 6 (2): 133–155. Feld, S. (1990), Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, Durham: Duke University Press. Feld, S. (1996), ‘Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea’, in S. Feld and K. H. Basso (eds), Senses of Place, 91–135, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Finnegan, R. (2003), ‘Music, Experience, and the Anthropology of Emotion’ in M. Clayton, T. Herbert and R. Middleton (eds), The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, 181–192, New York: Routledge. Frith, S. (1996), Performing Rites. On the Values of Popular Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fuller, M. (2007), Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Garber, M., B. Hansen and R. L. Walkowitz, eds. (2000), The Turn to Ethics, New York: Routledge. Geerz, C. (1973), The Interpretation of Culture, New York: Basic Books. Goodchild, P. (1996), Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire, London: Sage.

INTRODUCTION

27

Grosz, E. (1995), Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies, London: Routledge. Grosz, E. (2005a), Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power, Durham: Duke University Press. Grosz, E. (2005b), The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely, Durham: Duke University Press. Grosz, E. (2008), Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, New York: Columbia University Press. Grusin, R., ed. (2015), The Nonhuman Turn, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Guilbault, J. (2005), ‘Audible Entanglements: Nation and Diasporas in Trinidad’s Calypso Music Scene’, Small Axe, A Journal of Criticism 17: 40–63. Guilbault, J. (2007), Governing Sound. The Cultural Politics of Trinidad’s Carnival Musics, Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press. Guy, N. (2009), ‘Flowing Down Taiwan’s Tamsui River: Towards an Ecomusicology of the Environmental Imagination’, Ethnomusicology, 53 (2): 218–248. Haraway, D. J. (2007), When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Herzog, A. (2010), Dreams of Difference, Songs of the Same: The Musical Moment in Film, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hongisto, I. (2015), Soul of the Documentary: Framing, Expression, Ethics, Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press. Hulse, B. and N. Nesbitt, eds (2010), Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music, Farnham: Ashgate. Juslin, P. N. and J. Sloboda, eds (2011), Handbook of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Application, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kassabian, A. (2013), Ubiquitous Listening: Affect, Attention, and Distributed Subjectivity, Berkeley: University of California Press. Kisliuk, M. (2001), Seize the Dance!: BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kontturi, K.-K. (2012), Following the Flows of Process: A New Materialist Account of Contemporary Art, Turku: University of Turku. Koskoff, E. (2014), A Feminist Ethnomusicology: Writings on Music and Gender, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Kramer, L. (1990), Music as Cultural Practice: 1800–1900, Berkeley: University of California Press. Kramer, L. (1996), Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, Berkeley: University of California Press. Kramer, L. (1997), After the Lovedeath: Sexual Violence and the Making of Culture, Berkeley: University of California Press. Kramer, L. (1998), Franz Schubert: Sexuality, Subjectivity, Song, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leppert, R. (1995), The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body, Berkeley: University of California Press. Macarthur, S. (2010), Towards a Twenty-First Century Feminist Politics of Music, Farnham: Ashgate. Macgregor Wise, J. (2005), ‘Assemblage’, in C. J. Stivale (ed.), Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, 77–87, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.

28

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Manning, E. (2009), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Manning, E. (2013), Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance, Durham: Duke University Press. Marcus, G. E. and E. Saka (2006), ‘Assemblage’, Theory, Culture & Society, 23 (2–3): 101–106. Marks, J. (1998), Gilles Deleuze: Vitalism and Multiplicity, London: Pluto Press. Massumi, B. (1992), A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Massumi, B. (2002), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2009), ‘Of Microperception and Micropolitics: An Interview with Brian Massumi, 15 August 2008’, Inflexions: A Journal of Research-Creation 1 (3): 1–20. (http://www.senselab.ca/inflexions/volume_3/node_i3/massumi_en _inflexions_vol03.html, accessed 1 June 2016). McClary, S. (1991), Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. McClary, S. (1992), Georges Bizet: Carmen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McClary, S. (2000), Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form, Berkeley: University of California Press. McClary, S. (2004), Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal, Berkeley: University of California Press. McCormack, D. (2007), ‘Molecular Affects in Human Geography’, Environment and Planning A, 39 (2): 359–377. Middleton, R. (2003), ‘Introduction: Music Studies and the Idea of Culture’, in M. Clayton, T. Herbert and R. Middleton (eds), The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edn, 1–15. New York: Routledge. Moisala, P. (2008), ‘Joiku (yoik), Place, and Yoik Transmission in Finland’, European Meetings in Ethnomusicology, 12: 239–255. Monson, I. (1996), Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Nigianni, C. and Storr, M. (2009), Deleuze and Queer Theory, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. O’Sullivan, S. (2005), Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought beyond Representation, London: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Sullivan, S. (2012), On the Production of Subjectivity: Five Diagrams of the Finite–Infinite Relation, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Parikka, J. (2007), Digital Contagions: A Media Archaeology of Computer Viruses, New York: Peter Lang. Patton, P. (2006), ‘Order, Exteriority and Flat Multiplicities in the Social’, in M. Fuglsang and B. Meier (eds), Deleuze and the Social, 21–38, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pedelty, M. (2012), Ecomusicology. Rock, Folk, and the Environment, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Pisters, P. (2003), The Matrix of Visual Culture: Working with Deleuze in Film Theory, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pisters, P. (2012), The Neuro-Image: A Deleuzian Film-Philosophy of Digital Screen Culture, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

INTRODUCTION

29

Posters, M. and D. Savat (2009), Deleuze and New Technology, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Redner, G. (2010), Deleuze and Film Music: Building a Methodological Bridge between Film Theory and Music, Bristol: Intellect. Saldanha, A. (2007), Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shaviro, S. (1993), The Cinematic Body, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shelemay, K. K. (2009), ‘Performing the humanities at the Ethiopian Millennium’, Daedalus, 138 (1): 105–109. Shouse, E. (2005), ‘Feeling, Emotion, Affect’, M/C Journal, 8 (6), http://journal .media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php (accessed 21 March 2016). Small, C. (1998), Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Spinks, L. (2005), ‘Eternal Return’, in A. Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary, 82–84, New York: Columbia University Press. St. Pierre, E. and W. Pillow (2000), Working the Ruins: Feminist Poststructural Theory and Methods in Education, London: Routledge. Stewart, K. (2007), Ordinary Affects, Durham: Duke University Press. Stokes, M. (1994), Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place, Oxford: Berg. Subotnik, R. (1995), Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Thompson, M. and I. Biddle (2013a), Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience, London: Bloomsbury. Thompson, M. and I. Biddle (2013b), ‘Introduction: Somewhere between the Signifying and the Sublime’, in M. Thompson and I. Biddle (eds), Sound, Music, Affect. Theorizing Sonic Experience, 1–25, London: Bloomsbury. Tiainen, M. (2012), Becoming-Singer: Cartographies of Singing, Music-Making, and Opera, Turku: Uniprint. Tiainen, M. (2013), ‘Revisiting the Voice in Media and as Medium: New Materialist Propositions’, NECSUS – European Journal of Media Studies,E 1 (4), 383–406. http://www.necsus-ejms.org/revisiting-the-voice-in-media-and -as-medium-new-materialist-propositions/ (accessed 21 March 2016). Titon, J. (1997), ‘Knowing Fieldwork’, in G. F. Barz and T. J. Cooley (eds), Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, 87–100, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Väliaho, P. (2010), Mapping the Moving Image: Gesture, Thought and Cinema ca. 1900, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Wolfe, C. (2009), What Is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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 In English, there is a distinction between the Deaf and deaf. Capitalized Deaf refers to people who use sign language as their main method of communication. Furthermore, it describes people who tend to identify themselves as culturally deaf, and have a strong deaf identity. Deaf with the lower-case d refers to the physical condition of deafness, ‘or the larger group of individuals with hearing loss without reference to this particular culture’ (Padden and Humphries 2005: 1). Furthermore, Deaf scholar and activist Paddy Ladd (2013: xvii) clarifies that the term ‘hearing’ originates in the Deaf community to describe non-Deaf people, including deaf people. He suggests that the word ‘hearing’ might also be capitalized ‘to indicate an additional dimension expressed by Deaf people … akin to the capitalization of “White” or “Male” by Black and feminist theoreticians’. In this chapter I retain the above-mentioned distinctions that are defined and used by Deaf communities. 1

34

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

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

UNFOLDING NON-AUDIST METHODOLOGIES IN MUSIC RESEARCH 35

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

36

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

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. Signmark has served as the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs’ special representative for promoting the rights of people with disabilities at various international forums since 2010. 2

UNFOLDING NON-AUDIST METHODOLOGIES IN MUSIC RESEARCH 37

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 Tactile signing is a means of communication that is used by people with both hearing and sight impairment. Tactile signing also uses touch to mediate meaning. 3

38

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

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

UNFOLDING NON-AUDIST METHODOLOGIES IN MUSIC RESEARCH 39

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 pregiven 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 beyond the sense of hearing. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987: 492–499) writings about the concept of haptic are useful in the processes of emerging non-audist approaches to sound and music. Deleuze and Guattari allow, as sound artist and sound studies scholar Pedro Rebelo (2006) has pointed out, for both a haptic vision and a haptic act of listening. They (1987: 491) detach the haptic from a particular sensory modality, ‘the haptic is not about the tactile more than it is about visual or auditory sensation’ (Rebelo 2006: 6). ‘A haptic vision is that which, from the easel of the painter, summons not only the vision

40

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

(the eye) but, more importantly, the act of listening (the ears) and the touch’ (Bidima 2004: 179). Signmark’s performances can be apprehended as haptic engagements with music, therefore, as haptic acts of musicking. The isolated senses can be brought into contact with each other with the concept of vibration. Vibrations are truly significant in Signmark’s creative processes and performances. He describes his musicking practices as bodily vibrations: It is often thought that music is only for the hearing but this is not true. The vibrations coming from the bass provide the rhythm that I use to connect to the music. I use my full body to tap in and visualize with emotions and body motions. If there’s no motion, there is no rhythm. (Menon 2012) Signmark (22 January 2015) explains how low frequencies have a crucial function in his musicking. He says that he ‘feels best the instruments which produce vibration such as bass, drums, piano and low frequencies’. The clear bass line is a constitutive element in Signmark’s performances and music making. It enables him to follow the rhythm of music and to time his rhymes. The strong vibrations help him feel the musical sounds and adapt his signing and lyrics to the given rhythm. Signmark (22  January  2015) states that when listening to live performances, he usually locates himself, unlike the rest of the audience, near to the bass amplifier. Sound and music as a heard phenomenon apparently also consist of vibrations, but Signmark mostly feels and does not hear the vibrations. As Deleuze argues, rhythm is essentially connected to sensation – ‘sensation is vibration’ (Deleuze 2003: 39). Signmark’s musicking loosens the connection between music and hearing and manifests the multimodal becomings of musicking as vibrations. In Signmark’s performances, things, such as sound waves, the tactile sensations they engender and technological sound systems, interact with his musicking in ways that arguably move beyond clear distinctions between these elements. Signmark’s musicking consists, among other factors, of vibratory communication between human and non-human bodies. Political theorist Jane Bennett (2010: 21) declares that ‘[a] lot happens to the concept of agency once nonhuman things are figured less as social constructions and more as actors, and once humans themselves are assessed not as autonomous but as vital materialities’. Auditory technologies from the phonograph to the subwoofers have made it possible to experience vibrations of sound, and to see and to feel them as never before (Trower 2012: 3). Sound technologies are also active authors in the production of non-acoustic music. Vibrations, according to Goodman (2012: xiv), traverse ‘mind and body, subject and object, the living and the

UNFOLDING NON-AUDIST METHODOLOGIES IN MUSIC RESEARCH 41

nonliving’. The sounds and vibrations that Signmark and his audiences feel are generated by non-human technology; the beats in his music are made with computers and sound equipment. Goodman (2012: 71) observes the anthropocentrism of music and sonic analysis: [T]he phenomenological anthropocentrism of almost all musical and sonic analysis, obsessed with individualized, subjective feeling, denigrates the vibrational nexus at the altar of human audition, thereby neglecting the agency distributed around a vibrational encounter and ignoring the nonhuman participants of the nexus of experience. Approaching Signmark’s musicking as vibrational forces and as sensation, according to Deleuze, allows new becomings to emerge besides the more conventional and audist conceptions of musical authorship, while acknowledging the ways in which human and non-human components jointly partake in the production of music making.

Signmark’s authorship In a rap scene, the rapper is usually considered the most significant author among the performers who produce music. When the rapper does not produce sound but performs by signing, dancing and moving, his or her authorship might be questioned. The questions concerning definition of authorship are posed and answered in very specific and detailed ways in, for example, copyright laws. In 2012, Signmark was denied the royalties by the Finnish copyright society Gramex which operates as a link between the users of recorded music and performing artists and producers, who make recorded music. Gramex (2015) collects compensations for the use of recordings and distributes the payments collected to performing artists, whose voice or playing has been recorded and to recording producers. Signmark explains in a newspaper article that he has tried to negotiate with Gramex regarding his royalties: During the past six years I have tried to make them understand that I write the lyrics and arrange the music to fit the sign language. I even tried to suggest that they could fit me in the category of conductors. They answered that in order to do fit in there would have to be at least six musicians on the stage . … Perhaps I should clap my hands in the next album to produce sounds. (Tervo 2012, translated by Taru Leppänen)

42

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Gramex has paid Signmark royalties when he has been the producer, but he would like to also be recognized as an artist. Signmark (Kotimaa24) clarifies that according to Gramex, singing in sign language is not singing, because in their opinion recording consists solely of sounds. The reason for denying the royalties according to Gramex was that Signmark does not produce sound in the recordings. A pseudonym Vanillaplayers (2014) describes Signmark’s authorship as follows, ‘He does everything that someone u would call “a musician” does. Sign language is his VOICE.’ There is clearly a fit between Signmark as a musician and his audiences. In this respect, Signmark does not need any interventions from scholars in order to fit into the hip hop and rap scenes, and capitalist music industry. Signmark is an eminent figure in Finnish and international Deaf cultures. Furthermore, he is a successful rap artist who has made his living as a musician for years. Rather, Signmark’s musicking highlights the inherent audism in Finnish copyright law. Anthropologists Michele Friedner and Stefan Helmreich (2012: 73) have outlined that ‘foundational work in Deaf studies argues that audist and phonocentric tendencies suffuse everyday interactions as well as cultural theory, which tune to hearing and voicing as key modes of discriminating human sociality’. Audism, discrimination against individuals and groups based on hearing ability (Bauman 2004: 240), affects music cultures in various ways. Nonetheless, as sound studies scholar Jonathan Sterne (2012b: 20) notices, the Deaf and hard-of-hearing are not absent but present ubiquitously in the history of sound, both as objects and subjects. The Deaf and Deafhood have an eminent position in, for example, Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone and in the development of twentieth-century sound technologies. For me as a researcher, Signmark’s authorship appears as a complex twofold phenomenon. Feminist disability scholar Rosemarie GarlandThomson (2011) has launched the critical concept ‘misfit’ in order to think through the lived identity and experience of disability as it is situated in place and time. The idea of a misfit and the situation of misfitting elaborate a materialist feminist understanding of disability. The terms misfit and misfitting express the dynamic material relations between bodies, spaces and discourses (ibid.). On the one hand, Signmark’s musicking does not fit with the hearing definitions of authorship but on the other hand he is a successful rap artist. Approaching Signmark’s musicking as vibrational forces and as sensation according to Deleuze and Guattari allowed me to account for new and non-audist becomings while acknowledging the ways in which human and non-human components jointly partake in the production of music making. In so far as music is approached as musicking, its authorship is always shared. The vibrations disperse over human and non-human bodies and, therefore, the shared formation of authorship

UNFOLDING NON-AUDIST METHODOLOGIES IN MUSIC RESEARCH 43

becomes eminently axiomatic. Authorship does not reside in an individual body or subjectivity. It is rather an assemblage composed by manifold components. Musicking often comprises agents, human and non-human, who are not directly producing sound. Even if there is only one person singing, musicking entails, in addition to the singer, non-human capabilities and agents, such as technologies and vibrations. Signmark’s musicking entails two kinds of new becomings in connection with authorship. Firstly, Deaf musicians apparently are not usually considered authors in Western music cultures or music studies. Because of this, they are in the process of becoming authors. Secondly, his musicking creates a particular musicking assemblage that contains Deaf and non-Deaf bodies and human and non-human agents. The politics of these two kinds of becomings differ from each other. At the moment when Deaf studies and Deaf cultures seem to be operating on the margins of Western societies and music studies, the latter kind of becoming that entails distributed authorship could appear to undo the possibility of recognition of Deaf musical authorship and identity politics in conventional terms. However, I argue that these two kinds of becomings are both needed in order to acknowledge Signmark’s and Deaf musicians’ authorship. The two kinds of becomings coalesce in the processes of becoming Deaf. If Signmark’s subjectivity is conceptualized as autonomous and individual, his body does not produce sound while performing. However, his body engages in musicking admittedly and in significant ways. In order to allow Signmark to act as an author, we have to renounce as inherent the audist assumptions of music and its authorship. An artist and sound studies scholar Will Schrimshaw (2013: 31) proposes that the sound could be silent and residing, at least in part, beyond the ear. This could mean that the sound would become, in Deleuzian-Guattarian terms, imperceptible. However, in Deleuze and Guattari’s vocabulary, the notion of imperceptible does not presume that the involved sounds would be silent or beyond the ear. According to Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 248), music ‘tends to become progressively more molecular in a kind of cosmic lapping through which the inaudible makes itself heard and the imperceptible appears as such’. For them, all kinds of processes and practices that escape the normative, predetermined and recognizable identities and forms are becoming imperceptible. In Deleuze and Guattari’s sense, imperceptible means that we need to allow for unpredictability with regard to who or what participates in musicking, what roles the participants may acquire, how they interrelate and affect each other, and how the identities of things we thought we knew may modulate and reform. Audist premises force us to think about sounds and music in terms of hearing and concealing the multimodal processes of musicking. When music becomes imperceptible, the non-audist manners of making and experiencing music also become attainable and present.

44

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Becoming Deaf Becomings, processes of affecting and becoming affected, are always, in Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking, involving the becoming-other of the Western subject. These becomings consist of becomings such as becoming‑woman, becoming-child, becoming-music. The processes of becomings comprise possibilities for destabilizing the dichotomies – for example, Deaf and nonDeaf, Hearing and non-Hearing, female and male, white and non-white. While identities based on categorizations of identities can be very useful in creating a stable sense of ‘self’, they can also be extremely limiting, ‘for they reduce the body to particular modes of being and interacting’ (Hickey-Moody and Malins 2007: 5). However, ‘in becoming-other, every “one” loses face and identity, and finds creative solutions, and ways to gain pleasure. Paradoxically, one finds “survival” at the expense of “identity”, by becoming-other’ (Flieger 2000: 61). Art education scholar Vicki Crowley (2010) has analyzed becoming deaf in the workplace of academia. Her article is based on her experiences of becoming deaf as an academic person and she analyses her becoming deaf with Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts. However, in Crowley’s text hearing is maintained as a privileged identity. She (2010: 549) states that deafness ‘is not a celebratory identity marker like queer’. It is ‘popularly read as a nuisance, an irritation, an annoyance, a bother, a pain unevenly shared, unevenly labile’.4 Crowley’s interpretation of deafness is, without doubt, based on her experiences as an academic who is losing her ability to hear. In addition, her experiences are connected with her position as a deaf, not a Deaf person (545). My aim is not to underestimate these problems or to question the experiences of the persons involved. Instead, I would like to point out the difference between understanding deafness as disabledness and deafness as a minority culture. Crowley’s description of Deafhood as a non-celebratory identity is surely accurate also within Western music cultures, where deafness hardly or only seldom can be experienced as a celebratory identity. However, this depends on the position from where the assessment is made. Becoming Deaf increases the capacities of bodies when it maintains the difference between the Deaf and non-Deaf bodies. In relation to race and raciality Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 178) state that ‘European racism has never operated by exclusion’. Instead of exclusion, racism ‘operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man face, which endeavors

However, slogans like Deaf Pride and Deaf Power were already popular during the 1970s when Deaf people began organizing a social movement and defining themselves as a linguistic minority instead of a disabled group (Shakespeare 2006: 93). 4

UNFOLDING NON-AUDIST METHODOLOGIES IN MUSIC RESEARCH 45

to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions, … sometimes erasing them’. Similarly, the privilege of hearing does not necessarily operate only by treating the Deaf as Others and excluding them but also by including them and measuring their deviation from the norms of the non-Deaf (cf. Holland 2013: 86). Instead of treating Deaf and non-Deaf as distinct categories or identities, the concept of becoming transforms the subjectivities of a Deaf and a nonDeaf from fixed entities, from being, into open and dynamic materialities. Becomings are ‘specific movements, specific forms of motion and rest, speed and slowness, points and flows of intensity’ (Grosz 1994: 173). Becomings are always minoritarian in the sense that they are always departures from the majority or the standard. A becoming is opening up toward the other; it is always a matter of becoming something other than what is offered by the dominant conceptual categories of a given society; it is a movement away from the given toward that which a society refuses or is as yet unable to recognize (May 2001). Becoming is relatedness with forces of other bodies. A Deaf or a Hearing person is becoming-Deaf when he or she is related to forces that are attached to Deaf people. In the Deleuzian-Guattarian processes of becoming, becoming-woman is a privileged mode of becoming. Nevertheless, women must also becomewoman, if a change in the prevailing conceptions of woman and molar conceptualizations of gender in our culture are pursued. As cultural theorist Verena Andermatt Conley (2000: 35) has stated, ‘becoming-woman entails a continuous turning away from one’s present conditions, an ongoing actualization of virtualities’. Likewise Deaf people must also become Deaf. Signmark does not want to pass as a hearing musician. Rather, he both maintains and blurs the difference between non-Deaf and Deaf in his performances. In Signmark’s musicking, deafness is not expressed as a disability. Instead of inhabiting a molar Deaf identity, Signmark is becoming Deaf while musicking. His body becomes, in the molecular flows of musicking, capable of musicking in ways that have not previously existed. Becoming allows us to pay attention to change and transformation; it means moving away from fixed identities – from how, for example, Deaf and nonDeaf people are usually understood in the context of musical practices. Because of the open-ended and unpredictable nature of becoming, we cannot know what Deafhood is. Deaf and non-Deaf people’s bodies are capable of affecting each other by Signmark’s musicking. Affect is the chance, or variation, that occurs when bodies come into contact with each other (Colman 2005: 11). Signmark’s fans and audiences consist of both Deaf and Hearing audiences. His performances also give non-Deaf audiences a possibility to become Deaf. They, including me as a researcher, can celebrate Deafness even if it is not experienced in their own bodies. When Deaf and Hearing bodies are

46

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

musicking in Signmark’s performances, they are no longer merely Deafs or non-Deafs. The intra-action5 of their bodies enables subjectivities and embodiments, which cannot be entitled simply as characteristic of Deaf or Hearing people. Instead, these bodies and subjectivities are becoming Deaf in these musicking processes.

Critical studies of Hearing I suggest that critical studies of Hearing have to do with enhancing nonaudist methodologies in sound and music research by allowing musicking bodies, both human and non-human, to become Deaf. In regard to Signmark’s musicking processes, critical studies of Hearing bring out the constant negotiations and fluctuations between identity politics on the one hand and processes of becoming imperceptible on the other. In this chapter, I have pursued 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. Hearing in the fields of sound studies and music research can be discussed critically with the help of the concept of becoming Deaf. Becoming Deaf does not mean becoming non-Hearing or non-listening. Rather than nonHearing, becoming Deaf denotes moving away from audism, moving away from discrimination on the basis of ability to hear and from the conventional ways of experiencing music in terms of non-Deaf people. In the processes of becoming Deaf, deafhood transforms from a restriction or deficiency into possibilities. When music is conceived as musicking, we are permitted to let go of all the allegedly pre-constituted factors of the phenomenon that we are used to calling sound or music. In the processes of musicking, there are no indispensable pre-established components or characteristics. Instead of predetermined features, musicking emerges in singular relations between the human and non-human, and d/Deaf and Hearing participants. It is impossible to know beforehand, who or what is capable of relating and how this relating will happen. Musicking always entails the possibility of molecular becomings.

The concept intra-action has been introduced by feminist theorist and physicist Karen Barad (2007). According to Barad, subjects and objects do not precede their intra-actions. Instead of the traditional notion of interaction, the concept of intra-action underlines the mutual constitution of intra-actants that come into being only via their mutual intra-actions. The notion of intraaction proposes a new way of thinking causality (van der Tuin and Dolphijn 2012). 5

UNFOLDING NON-AUDIST METHODOLOGIES IN MUSIC RESEARCH 47

References Interviews Signmark (Marko Vuoriheimo), Helsinki, 22 January 2015, interviewer Taru Leppänen. The interview was interpreted between Finnish Sign Language and spoken Finnish by an interpreter. All the citations from the interview are translated into English by the author.

Internet sources Embassy of Finland [Washington, D.C.] (2014), ‘Signmark, Deaf Rap Artist to Perform in NYC – Message of Equality & Love for Music’. Available online: http://www.finland.org/public/default.aspx?contentid=309135&nodeid=35833 &contentlan=2&culture=en-US (accessed 7 November 2015). Glennie, E. (1993), ‘Hearing Essay’, Evelyn.co.uk. Available online: http://www .evelyn.co.uk/Resources/Essays/Hearing%20Essay.pdf (accessed 1 November 2014). Gramex (2015), ‘Kuka saa korvauksia ja kuinka paljon?’ [Who gets paid and how much?]. Available online: http://www.gramex.fi/fi/oikopolut/usein _kysywttya/paljonko_korvauksia_muusikot_ja_tuottajat_saavat (accessed 1 November 2015). Kotimaa24 (2012), ‘Kuurojen Liitto: Signmarkin saatava korvaukset’ [The Finnish Association of the Deaf: Signmark has to get royalties], Kotimaa24, 7 November. Available online: http://www.kotimaa24.fi/artikkeli/kuurojen -liitto-signmarkin-saatava-gramex-korvaukset/ (accessed 23 November 2014). Mattila, I. (2014), ‘Pelkoa vastaan! Tarja Halonen viittoo Signmarkin uutuusvideolla’ [Against Fear! Tarja Halonen signs in Signmark’s new music video], Nyt, 3 April 2014. Available online: http://nyt.fi/a1305808609673 (accessed 3 November 2014). Menon, V. (2012), ‘Deaf Rapper Feels the Music and Sings by Signing’, thestar.com. Available online: http://www.thestar.com/life/2012/04/12/deaf_rapper_feels_the _music_and_sings_by_signing.html (accessed 3 November 2014). Tervo, T. (2012), ‘Kuuro räppäri jää ilman Gramex-tukia: Ei tuota ääntä’ [A Deaf rap artist will not get royalties from Gramex: He does not produce sound], Helsingin Uutiset, 25 October. Available online: http://www.helsinginuutiset .fi/artikkeli/168169-kuuro-rappari-jaa-ilman-gramex-tukia-ei-tuota-aanta (accessed 23 November 2014). Vanillaplayers (2014), ‘A comment for Signmark’s “Smells Like Victory”’, YouTube. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=oUtM8_DO VUI&lc=R1VyifpIS0V62eWxj53iJqoUt-srkXKVzwqzyMx4ElA (accessed 23 November 2014).

48

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Literature Adams, R. and D. Savran, eds. (2002), The Masculinity Studies Reader, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Barad, K. (2007), Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, Durham & London: Duke University Press. Bauman, H. D. L. (2004), ‘Audism: Exploring the Metaphysics of Oppression’, Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 9 (2): 239–246. Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham: Duke University Press. Bidima, J.-G. (2004), ‘Music and the Socio-Historical Real: Rhythm, Series and Critique in Deleuze and O. Revault d’Allonnes’, in J. Buchanan and M. Swiboda (eds), Deleuze and Music, 175–195, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Bogue, R. (2003), Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts, New York and London: Routledge. Bogue, R. (2012), ‘Nature, Law and Chaosmopolitanism’, in R. Braidotti and P. Pisters (eds), Revisiting Normativity with Deleuze, 98–118, London et al.: Bloomsbury. Colman, F. J. (2005), ‘Affect’, in Adrian Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary, 11–13, New York: Columbia University Press. Conley, V. A. (2000), ‘Becoming-Woman Now’, in I. Buchanan and C. Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and Feminist Theory, 18–37, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Crowley, V. (2010), ‘A Rhizomatics of Hearing: Becoming Deaf in the Workplace and Other Affective Spaces of Hearing’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 31 (4): 543–558. del Río, E. (2008), Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, G. (2003), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Erlmann, V. (2010), Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality, New York: Zone Books. Fine, M., L. Weis, L.C. Powell and L. M. Wong (1997), Off White: Readings on Race, Power and Society, London and New York: Routledge. Flieger, J. A. (2000), ‘Becoming-Woman: Deleuze, Schreber and Molecular Identification’, in I. Buchanan and C. Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and Feminist Theory, 38–63, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Friedner, M. and S. Helmreich (2012), ‘Sound Studies Meets Deaf Studies’, The Senses and Society, 7 (1): 72–86. Fulford, R., J. Ginsborg and J. Goldbart (2011), ‘Learning Not to Listen: The Experiences of Musicians with Hearing Impairments’, Music Education Research, 13 (4): 447–464. Garland Thomson, R. (2011), ‘Misfits: A Feminist Materialist Disability Concept’, Hypatia, 26 (3): 591–609.

UNFOLDING NON-AUDIST METHODOLOGIES IN MUSIC RESEARCH 49

Goodman, S. (2012), ‘The Ontology of Vibrational Force’, in J. Sterne (ed.), Sound Studies Reader, 70–72, Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge. Grosz, E. (1994), Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Hickey-Moody, A. and P. Malins (2007), ‘Introduction: Gilles Deleuze and Four Movements in Social Thought’, in A. Hickey-Moody and P. Malins (eds), Deleuzian Encounters: Studies in Contemporary Social Issues, 1–24, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Holland, E. W. (2013), Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, London et al.: Bloomsbury. Ladd, P. (2013), Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood, Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Lane, H. (2002), ‘Do Deaf People Have a Disability?’ Sign Language Studies, 2 (4): 356–379. May, T. (2001), ‘The Ontology and Politics of Gilles Deleuze’, Theory and Event, 5 (3). Available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/tae.2001.0017. Mullarkey, J. (2006), Post-Continental Philosophy, London: Continuum. Padden, C. and T. Humphries (2005), Inside Deaf Culture, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rebelo, P. (2006), ‘Haptic Sensation and Instrumental Transgression’, Contemporary Music Review, 25 (1/2): 27–35. Schrimshaw, W. (2013), ‘Non-Cochlear Sound: On affect and Exteriority’, in M. Thompson and I. Biddle (eds), Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience, 27–43, New York and London: Bloomsbury. Shakespeare, T. (2006), Disability Rights and Wrongs, London and New York: Routledge. Small, C. (1998), Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Stenros, N. (2008), Signmark, Helsinki: Otava. Sterne, J. (2012a), ‘Introduction’, in J. Sterne (ed.), Sound Studies Reader, 1–17, Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge. Sterne, J. (2012b), ‘Hearing, Listening, Deafness’, in J. Sterne (ed.), Sound Studies Reader, 19–21, Abingdon, UK, and New York: Routledge. Trower, S. (2012), Senses of Vibration: A History of the Pleasure and Pain of Sound, New York and London: Continuum. van der Tuin, S. and R. Dolphjin (2012), New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, AnnArbor: Open Humanities Press.

2 A Micropolitics of BecomingWoman and Moya Henderson’s Rinse Cycle Sally Macarthur

Women’s music continues to be under-represented in music performance venues (Ayres 2013; Macarthur 2013; Macarthur 2014), which is an issue with which the Australian composer, Moya Henderson (b. 1941) has grappled for several decades. Henderson is well known for her views on gender inequality and has repeatedly called for an overhaul of policies in music funding bodies (e.g. Henderson 2013) but these have been largely ignored. However, as I will argue in this chapter, while it is urgent and necessary to call for equal representation of women with men in music composition, the identity politics that underpin such calls tend to reinforce the gender stereotypes that position men as dominant and women as subordinate. Identity politics are divisive because they are founded on binary logic, therefore polarizing male and female. A politics based on identity is also limited in that identity categories conceal as much as they reveal, and individuals will mostly traverse multiple identities simultaneously. It is for this reason, in recent years, that I have become attracted to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, for their work offers a productive methodological framework for rethinking identity. They call for a politics of becoming which, as cultural theorists Anna Hickey-Moody and Peta Malins (2007: 6) write, ‘seeks to dismantle the social stratifications and open onto an unknown field of differentiation’. Despite philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (1993) famously canvassing why some feminists have

52

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

resisted Deleuzian philosophy, I will suggest that its productive possibilities far outweigh the criticisms it has received for its masculine orientation. There is also a view that Deleuzian philosophy is a ‘thinker’s paradise’ that is unable to solve real or actual world problems. Performance theorist Laura Cull (2015) says that this has been one of the stumbling blocks for feminists who have struggled to reconcile a Deleuzian micropolitics of becoming with the goals for actual change pursued in the real world by contemporary feminist groups. In Deleuzian thought, as cultural theorist Kenneth Surin (2005) points out, micropolitics is molecular and internal to what is produced, creating an ethos of a permanent becoming (162, 163). It differs from macropolitics, which, with its emphasis on standardization and homogeneity, sets out to change the actual world. In so doing, as Surin says, it leaves ‘no room for all that is flexible and contingent’ (162). In the spirit of a micropolitics of becoming, Deleuze’s project of liberating differencein-itself is, in Cull’s view, ‘ultimately more important than pursuing the macropolitical goals of feminism or Marxism or postcolonialism, which tend to pursue wholesale social change on behalf of identity’ (Cull 2015: 1). Like Cull, I am drawn to the idea of pursuing difference-in-itself, for such a concept has the potential to transform real-world problems in music. The orientation to a Deleuzian micropolitics of becoming as a methodology, then, enables me to challenge the usual representations of music as autonomous and self-contained. Such thinking shifts the emphasis from focusing on the internal structural relationships of a musical work to the ways in which music performs cultural work through its connections. While there is a growing number of scholars committed to feminist and cultural perspectives, there is also a pocket of scholarship that continues to be interested only in the purely musical aspects of music. Such scholarship tends to relegate the ‘non-musical’ to the category of ‘extra-musical’ where it is devalued. I contend that the practice of marginalizing the nonmusical in music is no longer tenable, especially given the increasing array of musical texts that are multi-textural, such as Henderson’s Rinse Cycle (2010), which I discuss below. Music is a dynamic, inter- and intra-textural art form, and its practices are culturally embedded, shaped by a multiplicity of conditions and interests. In this chapter, I will consider the ways in which these multiple textural dimensions and their connections within a Deleuzian micropolitics of becoming open up a new way of thinking about music. The Deleuzian approach in this chapter, however, is not straightforward, for while such an approach is capable of disrupting traditional modes of analysis, these traditional models continue to flourish and, out of necessity, they must coexist with a Deleuzian approach. What a Deleuzian framework enables, however, is the movement between two seemingly contradictory poles, such as that of a feminist macro and micropolitics. It enables me to reconcile two seemingly mutually exclusive positions, such as the

A MICROPOLITICS OF BECOMING-WOMAN AND RINSE CYCLE

53

life-affirming politics that lie at the heart of the concept ‘becoming-woman’ with the reality of women’s subjugation. One of the challenges for this chapter is, in fact, to square Deleuze’s concept of ‘becoming-woman’, as the forming of what musicologist Marianne Kielian-Gilbert (2010) refers to as the ‘not yet’ (204), with the concept of ‘being-woman’. Kielian-Gilbert explains that ‘Deleuze and Guattari initiate the becoming process from the position of man: “becoming-woman” is the first step of the processual stages, followed by becoming-animal, becoming-insect, becoming-mineral, becoming-molecular, and becoming-imperceptible’ (204). In Cull’s (2015: 4) simplification of this idea, becomings take place in a specific order, beginning with ‘the most accessible and moving towards the most radical’. In the initial becoming, identity is destabilized through the concept of ‘becoming-woman’ and then it is completely dissolved through the concept of ‘becoming-imperceptible’. It is also important to recognize that ‘becoming-woman’ is not based on the recognition of woman as a molar identity – that is, as a physical, female form – for as Grosz (1993: 177) points out, ‘for women, as much as for men, the process of becomingwoman is the destabilization of molar identity’. In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 277), all becomings must ‘begin with and pass through becoming-woman. It is the key to all other becomings’. Women’s subjugation, in contrast, is discursively situated in the dominant account of identity that relies on a representational matrix which is inherently hierarchical and which yields to the law of normativity in which difference from the male norm is most often understood as negative. According to social theorist and philosopher Brian Massumi (1987: xiii), binary logic produces negative difference. He says that its ‘modus operandi is negation: x = x = not y (I = I = not you)’. For example, Henderson’s program note for her music-theatre work, Rinse Cycle (2010a),1 follows this logic, representing woman in terms of being-woman. It conceives of the identity of woman – portrayed in the work by the characters of a young, postulant nun and her biological mother – as the negation of man. My aim is to offer a reading of Rinse Cycle as a becoming-woman in which the stereotypical images of women’s identities are dissolved. Another challenge for this paper is to ask whether a Deleuzian methodological framework is capable of analyzing the specificity of the musical work while simultaneously engaged with notions of music as a dynamic and fluid process. How do we shift from thinking about music as a fixed entity to its conceptualization as flows, forces, intensities and

The premiere of Rinse Cycle by Australian composer Moya Henderson was given by the Sydney-based, new music group, Ensemble Offspring, at Carriageworks, Sydney, Australia, 30 November 2010. This performance of the work is available on YouTube (see Henderson 2010b). 1

54

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

desires? According to music theorist Christopher Hasty (2010: 3), ‘music is especially problematic in its resistance to representation – it is in this sense a violation of good sense. For this reason, music can provide a useful vehicle for criticizing the doxa of representation and thus for thinking in unorthodox ways that problematize notions of subject and object, unity and multiplicity, finite and infinite, knowing and feeling’. Furthermore, as philosopher Claire Colebrook and literary theorist David Bennett (2009) point out, as a non-referential regime of signs, music for Deleuze ‘enables us to think how a form of expression (a relation among sounds) enables a form of content (a body and its orientations … [it offers itself as a formal system and simultaneously] privileges the least formalised elements: variations of tone, timbre, intonation and vibrato are inflections that constitute the event of music’ (76–77). Music theory and performance practice ‘has sought to reconcile music with the demand for representation’ (Hasty 2010: 3), thus relying on identity-thinking which, as musicologist Edward Campbell (2013: 3–6) comments, treats the enunciations of musical ideas as privileged objects. From a Deleuzian perspective, identity-thinking is unproductive, encouraging us to reproduce what is already there rather than opening up the possibility that what is already there is also simultaneously involved in its ongoing production. If we want to reimagine women’s music as a becoming, we need to look beyond identity-thinking, and beyond the story or narrative of the work, to the problem it is answering. Colebrook (2002a) posits Kafka’s minor literature as answering a specific problem, claiming that he was ‘writing in German as a Czech national’ (xxxiv, see also Deleuze and Guattari 1986). Accordingly, she says that Kafka did not occupy a language ‘that he could consider his own or identical with his being’ (Colebrook 2002b: 104). His work was the vehicle for the creation of identity rather than the expression of identity. When a term is expressive it is majoritarian. When it is creative, it is minoritarian, implying an identity-to-come, or a becoming. Kafka speaks to us because he wrote ‘not as a being with an identity, but as a voice of what is not given, a people to come’ (Colebrook 2002b: 104). A writer like Kafka writes without a standard notion of ‘the people’. Furthermore, Colebrook (2002b: 109–110) says that Kafka deployed a free indirect discourse, using a third person style of narration in order to describe the character according to the style of language that it might use. Such writing makes the boundary between author and character indistinguishable: ‘we are never certain who is speaking, the author or the author in the style of the character’ (109–110). In a similar vein, the ‘minor’ music of Henderson can be understood as responding to the problem of composing in a male tradition as a woman. As I will argue, however, this does not mean that Henderson expresses the negative, majoritarian representation of woman. Rather, through the proliferation of connections and affects, her work, Rinse Cycle, releases what is not given in the representational categories of negative difference.

A MICROPOLITICS OF BECOMING-WOMAN AND RINSE CYCLE

55

I have elsewhere suggested that representational models of music analysis show that Henderson’s music does not structurally conform to the norm. For example, a Golden Section analysis of her earlier work for organ and tape, Sacred Site (1983), shows that it is top-heavy: the ratio of the four sections approximates 5:1:1:2, and the two climaxes bear no relationship to the ideal proportion of 0.618 or its correlate 0.382 (Macarthur 2002: 164–172). What I want to think about instead of the structure and its expression of an ‘ideal’ proportion, however, is how Henderson’s music manifests as the creation of a style that is in tune with the concept of becoming-woman. Henderson uses techniques for her characters in Rinse Cycle that call into question the boundaries separating herself as composer from her characters, and that of her music from its theatrical context. There is an autobiographical dimension to the work in which the voice of the composer and its characters are mutually entangled with each other. Furthermore, even although the work deals with the question of women’s subjugation by the Church, Henderson’s use of satirical humor activates a becoming-woman by taking up the forces from which the actual woman is composed and exaggerating its traits almost beyond recognition. Henderson was a protégé of the Argentinian-born, Cologne-based musictheatre composer, Mauricio Kagel (1931–2008), with whom she studied in the 1970s. Like Kagel, Henderson’s music-theatre works, both Rinse Cycle and her earlier works in this genre, traffic in notions of the absurd. However, Henderson’s particular contribution to the genre is as a feminist who parodies hyper-femininity. Her theatrical and musical techniques, which include sight and aural gags, disturb normality. The techniques deployed by the composer are not merely tools of representational thought. The concept of ‘woman’ in Henderson’s work gives rise to new possibilities. As an open term in becoming, the actualized, ‘represented’ woman in Rinse Cycle extends its power to produce a becoming-woman. Henderson’s music simultaneously disrupts the value-laden binary oppositions that regulate the structural and social codes of music. The Deleuzian-inspired feminist analysis I undertake below, challenges the negative construction of woman as other to man. As a useful starting point, I invoke Grosz’s concept of ‘a thousand tiny sexes’ (Grosz 1993) which posits the ‘unified human body as an effect of processes of desire and becoming’ (Colebrook 2002a: xi). Henderson’s feminist project situates it as a political project: politics saturate her music, making her akin to Deleuze for whom politics, as the philosopher Véronique Bergen (2009) points out, permeates every aspect of his work. Cull (2015: 6) goes further to suggest that while Deleuze’s philosophy wants to take us away from where politics is, ‘situating it in some kind of abstract “elsewhere” that bears no relation to what you and I do, “here and now” … the point of Deleuze’s politics of becoming is exactly that there is no single here and now, no simple present where politics can take place’. For Cull, politics in Deleuzian thought happens when we elude

56

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

the ‘great dualism machines, and particularly that oppressive binary: man/ woman’ (6). In the spirit of this idea, the genre of experimental musictheatre can be understood as continually arranging and rearranging itself in terms of a political cartography or diagram. As such, it is composed of a movement that is marked by the operators of three kinds of line: molar, molecular and lines of flight. Cultural theorist, Ashley Woodward (2007: 69–70), writes that Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize these three lines of force as follows: Molar lines organize by drawing strict boundaries, creating binary oppositions and dividing space into rigid segments with a hierarchical structure. Molecular lines organize in a more supple way, interlacing segments in a non-hierarchical fashion. The line of flight is the privileged line for Deleuze and Guattari, since it is the line of change and metamorphosis. The line of flight doesn’t organize in a segmentary fashion, but is a pure movement of change, which breaks out of one form of organization and moves towards another. As a political project, Henderson’s work maps a movement between becoming and history, oscillating between the molecular and the molar. I will suggest that these two lines of force in Henderson’s Rinse Cycle ‘work on each other in a co-functionality which is subject to an incessant dynamism’ (Bergen 2009: 36). In the next two sections, I will deploy a Deleuzian methodology for mapping Henderson’s work as both molar and molecular: as a molar enterprise, the work operates according to an orientation to a feminist politics based on hierarchical difference; as a more fluid, molecular process, I will show the points at which it pivots on thresholds to open up becomings. To draw on cultural theorist Bronwyn Davies (2014: 21, original emphasis), I am interested in a creative engagement that ‘depends both on the existence of, and the capacity to let go of, the status quo’.

The molarity and molecularity of Rinse Cycle According to Henderson (2010a), Rinse Cycle is a ‘disturbingly profane piece’. It reflects on the first six months (February-August  1960) of the composer’s thirteen-year stretch as a nun in the convent at the end of which she ‘took the habit’ (Henderson 2010a). On the level of its molarity, the program note constructs the identity of the protagonists, a young nun and her mother, as powerless and inferior. Henderson (2010a) says that: The piece is about a young nun on the night before she ‘takes’ the habit. Her mother is already at the convent and is wandering about in a state of

A MICROPOLITICS OF BECOMING-WOMAN AND RINSE CYCLE

57

despair and fury at what is about to happen to her daughter. The clerics enjoy it all immensely. This inferior creature – a woman – is getting in much deeper than she could ever know. We see Daught [the young nun] having her hair hacked off; then out she comes in her new, all-enveloping outfit. The sight of the bonnet sends Mother into meltdown. She wreaks her vengeance on the bonnet and begins her own annihilation. Daught calls upon Reverend Mother to come and help her crazed parent, but, no show. Meanwhile the clerics have a high old time getting Daught to debase herself in good old convent fashion: plenty of floor and foot kissing. And of course, she must take the discipline. Ned Kelly’s mask makes a colourful and imaginative pain deflector. You will notice that the mask or Daught’s self-flagellation is a turn-on for the consecrated blokes. Henderson confesses that a terrible rage welled up in her as she composed Rinse Cycle. She accuses the Church of exercising criminal, life-long control over nuns, suggesting that this was for: economic reasons (why else?), they were (still are) forbidden to have any friends, or lovers of any description. They were (still are) ordered to live celibate lives for the whole of their lives. That any organisation should exercise such total control over other human beings, in this case, women, is the most egregious abuse of power. I rank it up there with Chinese foot-binding and genital mutilation. Now, the very idea of this kind of ‘religious’ subservience is totally abhorrent to me. Women in the Church have human rights, but the Church over the centuries has trampled upon both their rights and their femaleness. (Henderson 2010a) On the level of the molar, Henderson’s program note is underpinned by an oppositional consciousness. It takes shape as an autobiographical recollection of her own experiences as a nun in the 1960s. She posits the identities of her female characters in terms of real, actualized lives and experiences. There is a sense of melancholia, hopelessness and powerlessness pervading the narrative. The binary oppositions – with their implied master narrative of biological essentialism – remain firmly in place. The Roman Catholic Church is depicted as patriarchal: the capacity of women to function productively is severely diminished. The female characters are subjugated. How do we engage productively with women’s subjugation when it seems to be so massively weighed down by negativity? Identity-thinking organizes woman as the minority in the category in which the majority are male, and she is assessed according to her resemblance to, or difference from, the male standard. The reflective mode of writing by Henderson privileges a normative form of the individual. It relies on a negative concept

58

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

of power. In contrast, the molecularity of the subject, as conceived through a Deleuzian prism as ‘a series of flows, energies, movements, capacities’ (Grosz 1993: 173), would potentially liberate the identity of woman in this work. For Massumi (1987), the ‘rock-like identity’ of the closed system of representation is countered by Deleuze’s ‘nomad thought’ which does not ‘repose on identity’ but ‘moves freely’. It does not reflect upon the world but is: immersed in changing the state of things … Nomad thought replaces the closed equation of representation … with an open equation: … + y + z + a + … ( … + arm + brick + window + … ) … The modus operandi of nomad thought is affirmation, even when the apparent object is negative. (xii–xiii) Molecular thinking, as opened up by ‘nomad thought’ in Henderson’s creative work, as I will now argue, shifts from the closed, representational mode of thought, in which woman is posited as a negative relation to man, to imagining a space for new modes of bodies. I will now suggest that Henderson’s Rinse Cycle can be read as using the formalized elements of woman as a starting point and then engaging the concept of ‘woman’ as a virtual variation of itself through the production of theatrical and musical material. In this way, it can be understood as drawing out the potentiality that exceeds the actualized form of woman. For Colebrook (2002a: 92), ‘it is important to show how persons and interests are produced from chaotic flows of desire’. Deleuze and Guattari call this ‘micropolitics’. In the performance of Henderson’s Rinse Cycle, the micropolitics of becoming takes place through movement: that of the molar to that of the molecular. The clerics, who are already composed from political intensities that privilege a patriarchal form of humanity, are investigated in terms of their capacity to disrupt the molar form of humanity. The nun, who is already composed from a form of innocent, charitable humanism, is treated to a parodic interpretation of itself in terms of its hyper-femininity. And the mother, who is composed from a form of political intensities that vilify madness in all its forms, is rescued from her madness through rendering her character as absurd. The molarity of these identities, as I will show below, are transformed into their fluid, molecular forms through the flows of desire. Bergen (2009: 34) makes the point that in Deleuzian thought politics is ‘an orientation operating at the heart of every assemblage; its lines meeting everywhere where an assemblage – individual or collective, of thought or of desire – operates’. For Bergen, Deleuze’s work stems from an ‘analysis of politics in terms of desires’ (34). It is animated by the question, ‘how does desire come to desire its own repression?’ (34). It wants to understand politics in terms of lines and uses the cartography

A MICROPOLITICS OF BECOMING-WOMAN AND RINSE CYCLE

59

to map the assemblage. Henderson’s work, as I am suggesting, maps the assemblage of experimental music-theatre in these terms. Schizoanalysis, as employed by Deleuze and Guattari, facilitates the investigation of the production, release and affirmation of desire flows across every assemblage. The concept of ‘schizo’ is a ‘nomadic’ way of thinking about the human being that is not governed by any fixed norm or image of itself. Colebrook (2002b: 5) says that it imagines the human in a state of flux and becoming. For Hickey-Moody and Malins (2007: 14), schizoanalysis involves the ‘production, release and affirmation of flows of desire’ and is interested in how these are organized and organize themselves at the individual level or in relation to large assemblages in a given community (14–18). In the work of Deleuze and Guattari, the assemblage of desire moves in at least two directions, producing, on the one hand, paranoiac desires associated with rigid social structures, hierarchies and repression – as exemplified in Henderson’s program note – and, on the other hand, schizo desires that go against the strata that form revolutionary micro-flows and lines of escape (Hickey-Moody and Malins 2007: 15). According to HickeyMoody and Malins (16), ‘Deleuze and Guattari call for an understanding of fugitive desire flows (lines of escape and resistance) which acknowledges their important revolutionary potential’. Deleuze and Guattarian politics seek to affirm rather than to pathologize or criminalize lines which escape rigid structures and the stratified politics of identity. Such lines might be found in fringe art and, indeed, as I will now suggest, they are to be found in Henderson’s Rinse Cycle. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 203, original emphasis): The body is the only practical object of schizoanalysis. What is your body without organs? What are your lines? What map are you in the process of making or rearranging? What abstract line will you draw, and at what price for yourself and for others? What is your line of flight? … Are you cracking up? Are you going to crack up? Are you deterritorializing? Which lines are you severing, and which are you extending or resuming? Schizoanalysis does not pertain to elements or aggregates, nor to subjects, relations or structures. It pertains only to lineaments running through groups as well as individuals. Schizoanalysis, as the analysis of desire, is immediately practical and political, whether it is a question of an individual, group, or society. In the sense of its practicality and politics, Henderson’s experimental music-theatre piece, Rinse Cycle, is conceived as a dynamic desiringmachine that moves across paranoic and schizophrenic desire flows simultaneously.

60

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Molecular lines, machinic assemblage and schizoanalysis Rinse Cycle was composed in ‘Honour’ of Kagel and performed by members of the Sydney-based Ensemble Offspring who commissioned it for a performance at the Sounds Absurd Concert in 2010 (Henderson 2010a). It is written in the spirit of the experimental music-theatre genre pioneered by Kagel in the 1950s. As an assemblage of schizoanalytic, nomadic thought, I will now use the concept of ‘abstract machine’ to think about the genre of experimental music-theatre. An abstract machine shifts the focus from identity-thinking, such as what a given work might mean, to that of its continuous and ongoing difference. Conceptualized in this way, a machinic assemblage is never a closed system that works in isolation from other systems. Rather, it becomes an instrument of possibility, arising from the way it articulates or makes connections with other machines, including the researcher-cum-author machine. This allows for the possibility of creating new assemblages. In the 1960s, as discussed by musicologist Elliott Antokolotz (2014), the experimental music-theatre machine emerged as a reactive force to elitist forms of music such as opera. It deterritorialized the large-scale assemblage of music-theatre in all its forms, giving birth to the experimental Kagelian-machinic assemblage. The Henderson-machine plugged into the Kagelian-machine and performed its own variations of experimental music theatre, transforming the assemblage by mapping lines that rearranged its theatrical, musical and artistic problems. Henderson (2011) describes Kagel as a ‘theatreman par excellence’ (104). For Henderson, Kagel is ‘the archetypal prankster – his own Deus ex machina – presiding over every sound, gesture and sight gag with a merciless wit and omniscient irony’ (102). The Henderson-machine adopts the traits associated with the Kagelian-machine. The Kagelian-machine treats musical instruments like characters in a stage performance but not as representations of characters. Instruments are used as vehicles for rethinking the nature of theatrical presence in terms of their affective relations between audience and event, and for dealing with the absurd in everyday life. The Henderson-machine plugs into the Kagelianmachine and, in Rinse Cycle, treats the two cellos as non-representational affective-character-machines. The machinic assemblage of cellos hooks up with the unfolding performance, producing an array of sonic affects: pizzicatos, taps, glissandi and ‘wonky’ glissandi, ‘slip-sliders’, unison, counterpoint, harmony, and dissonance (Henderson 2010b: 1). The cellists, plugged into their cello-machines, are also treated as characters but they are costumed to represent the clergy: one is a cardinal and the other a bishop. At the outset, they process through the audience, carrying their bows and waving them about in grandiose gestures that ape blessings … modelled on

A MICROPOLITICS OF BECOMING-WOMAN AND RINSE CYCLE

61

knot designs’ (Henderson 2010b: 1). They take up their positions on the stage, doubling as singers and actors and operating the sounds produced from their cello-machines. The Henderson-machine adopts an extravagantly performative style. Performance theorist Edward Sheer’s description of Artaud’s work ‘as an experiment in thought, both fully mad and entirely credible’ (Sheer 2009: 37) is just as apt for the Kagelian-Henderson machine. According to Henderson (2011: 104), Kagel’s genius ‘was powered by his mad-cap love affair with theatre, and it was the basics of theatrical technique that kept him forever practical … Endless invention, intrigue and surprise in Kagel’s music-theatre were at all times off-set with punctilious discipline … Timing was everything’. Henderson remarks that restraint and complexity are superimposed on madness and these qualities give rise to the quintessential Kagel (104). Restraint, complexity, madness and affective presence creates the ongoing differenciation of the Kagelian-Henderson machinic assemblage. As an Argentinian national, Kagel’s work responds to having outsiderstatus in Germany in the dominant serial music tradition epitomized by Stockhausen. The minority position of Kagel’s music-theatre in this tradition is doubly minor, for it parodies the elitist operatic tradition and, in so doing, creates an endless supply of inventive elucidations of musical identity. It rebels against the established norms associated with the high art tradition epitomized by Stockhausen. It rejects serialism and its obsessive fastidiousness with every musical enunciation. Similarly, Henderson is doubly minor but in a different way from Kagel. Her work is concerned with the problem of women’s representations in art and life than with invention of a new genre. Her work subverts the established norms of music by stripping music of its unnecessary harmonic content while satirizing ‘serious’ atonality. Kagel is more interested in using the medium of music to explore theatre, and the medium of theatre to explore music. According to Henderson (2011: 104), he is concerned with the ‘overall impact of a piece’, and how it will affect the audience. Kagel’s work is unorthodox, absurd and playful, and antagonistic to everything German. It opposes the accepted norms of high art music, in particular, opera. It represents the ethos of anti-art in the sense that it tests the boundaries between one art form through that of another. Henderson’s encounter with the experimental space of the Kagelian-machine is transformative. In the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 249, quoted in Davies 2014: 9), ‘the self is a threshold, a door, a becoming between two. Each multiplicity is defined by a borderline … but there is a string of borderlines, a continuous line of borderlines … following which the multiplicity changes’. Poised on the edge of Kagel’s theatre, the Henderson-machine deterritorializes the Kagelian-machine, making a different map that opens up questions about outsider-status and rearranging the problem to suit a

62

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

feminist agenda that seeks to liberate woman. The Henderson-machine composes work that is anti-establishment, both in rejecting serialism and complexity, and in working as a woman. But it does not leave the molar identity of woman in place. The combined Kagelian-Henderson-machinic assemblage carves out a creative territorial space: an experimental musictheatre assemblage emerges from the connections between the two composers, and their ideas, music, actions, engagements with feminism’s reactive forces, and all the other materials into which it comes into contact. Henderson (2011: 102) recounts an astonishing first lesson with Kagel in which he ‘reached for a pocket-size English Dictionary and opened it up at … the Os’ and instructed her to use the ‘O’ words to write between three and five new pieces. The theatre of problems for Henderson commence with this first lesson. From that time onwards, her work begins to investigate her own ‘weird baggage’ as a ‘simple’ nun and a ‘woman’ in a man’s world (101), using the idea of the absurd to free music and text from their actual material realities. Two sight-gags in the Henderson-machine’s earlier feminist music-theatre work, Stubble (1975) – the toothy mouth of a dressing table powered by a treadle machine operated by the female vocalist from which a man’s voice can be heard uttering random but gory quotes from cookbooks, and yards of hair from what appear to be the breasts of the female character – activate becomings (Henderson 2011: 105–106; Macarthur 2002: 160–164). The Henderson-machine combines music, theatre and text in new ways, affirming the work as active, inventive creation rather than reactive representation. Some of Henderson’s best experimental music-theatre works were produced while studying in Cologne with Kagel and resurface in Sydney some thirty years later in Rinse Cycle. The molar cartography of Rinse Cycle’s program note, representing the female’s body as subjugated and negative, is overturned by the molecular cartography of the work’s performance. Its molecular lines perform a schizophrenic cartography of reality, generating an overabundance of meaning. The potentiality of the actualized form of the woman is drawn out of the piece in the mode of hyper-femininity, in particular, as expressed by the hysterical mother transformed into a chainsaw. To erode the molar cartography, a creative, open system of thought is introduced: rinse cycle + washing machine + woman + chainsaw + extravagant pillbox hat + nun’s bonnet + balloons + peaches + plums. At the level of the molar, these objects are used as props and thought-images in Rinse Cycle. The mother’s hat is adorned with fruit; the nun’s wimple enclosed by balloons, highlighting the craziness of the attire that nuns were compelled to wear; the chainsaw is a sight and aural gag but, as I will argue below, it is more than this; and ‘rinse cycle’ refers to a washing machine. Some of the theatre-piece is set in the laundry of the convent. Nomad thought thus becomes the modus operandi of Rinse Cycle.

A MICROPOLITICS OF BECOMING-WOMAN AND RINSE CYCLE

63

I will now argue that the chainsaw creates a musical rendition of the mother’s hidden feelings of anguish, desperation, despair and anger2 while at the same time, as an imagined musical instrument, extending the capacities of Western art music and its existing repertoire of sounds on conventional instruments. In so doing, it ‘thumbs its nose’ at high-art music – indeed, overpowers high-art music – and, to draw on Colebrook and Bennett (2009: 77), opens onto ‘different modes of synthesis and audibility, irreducible to the sight of its initial articulation’. The chainsaw is normally a tool with a utilitarian purpose: tree-lopping. In the context of a theatre-piece about a nun and an unhinged mother it seems absurd. And yet, it is possible to conceive of the chainsaw, in this context, as musical, theatrical and machinic: a machine with a utilitarian purpose and a musical instrument and a character. On the level of its molarity, the chainsaw, when coupled with the human-character of the hysterical mother, exaggerates, until it annihilates, the human-character. As Henderson remarks, ‘the chainsaw says it all’ (Henderson, 12  October  2014). The chainsaw is the character. It growls and roars like an angry animal. It is explosive, eruptive and disruptive. On the level of its molecularity, it produces interior forces that overpower the body: spectators become participants, participating in the madness opened up by the chainsaw. The chainsaw oscillates movements with violence. It creates a spectacle of horror through the theatre of the absurd. It uses sound, gesture and text as pure invention and creation. It produces duration as a character. It creates a crazed mother as a monster in order to contrast it with a daughter who is pure, wide-eyed and innocent. In this micropolitical work, ‘abjection becomes splendour, the horror of life becomes a very pure and a very intense life’ (Deleuze 2007: 37). The Henderson-machine’s chainsaw establishes a relationship between the audibility of the animallike roar of the engine, the visibility of the menacing cutting-instrument, and the invisible forces that open up the multiplicity. Every sound made by the chainsaw produces a real and imagined state of affairs, rendering visible the unseen forces that create the female character as she spirals into meltdown. The lines of force are cracking up. The chainsaw can be thus understood as a becoming-animal, becoming-music and a becomingwoman. As music-theatre, Rinse Cycle produces micro-intensities that, following Grosz (1993: 178), establish an identity as a woman for setting the stage for the processes of becoming-woman. The character of the mother in the work, for Henderson, is created from a memory of how her real, biological mother responded to Henderson’s becoming a nun. Henderson says that when her mother visited her in the convent, she registered her mother’s complete dismay that her daughter had disappeared, wearing attire that covered her from head-to-toe. According to Henderson, from her mother’s perspective her face had gone, had forever gone (Henderson, 12 October 2014). 2

64

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Conclusion In this schizoanalysis, I have effectively argued that the Henderson-musictheatre machine is a becoming-animal, becoming-woman and a becomingimperceptible. Grosz (1993: 178) says that there is a kind of ‘progression’ in becomings, ‘an order or “system” in which becoming-woman is, for all subjects, a first step preceded by becoming animal, and then towards becoming-imperceptible’. The Henderson-machine engages productively with the idea of women’s subjugation, liberating it from its negativity. This productive engagement shows how Rinse Cycle passes through becominganimal and becoming-woman and, through the process of woman’s annihilation, performs a becoming-imperceptible of woman. To arrive at a becoming-imperceptible of woman may seem futile and politically unproductive in that, as Grosz (1993: 179) suggests, woman’s struggles are reduced to a political obliteration or marginalization. There is a danger that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-imperceptible renders women to a political obliteration and marginalization of women’s struggles. In this schizoanalysis of Rinse Cycle, however, I have shown that beingwoman, as molar, negative representation, is locked into a closed system for which there are no lines of escape. Becoming-woman and becomingimperceptible opens up an expressive intensity in which being-woman is continuously subjected to the novel, the new and the unanticipated. I want to suggest that the unanticipated also includes the transformative reading of the work that is enabled by Deleuzian thought. Kielian-Gilbert (2010: 204) suggests that the process of ‘emancipating the subject from its status as the subjected i.e. the bearer of qualities’ is what brings to fruition the creative potential of those very qualities. She goes on to say that becoming is thus itself paradoxical, ‘a process directed toward imperceptibility and invisibility and toward discernibility, differentiation, and actualization and refinement’ (204). The transformative nature of the intensities of woman, as created in the setting of the music-theatre work, produces endless possibilities for the productive and ongoing creation of difference. As minoritarian art, Henderson’s work is concerned with the creation, rather than the expression, of identity. The work creates excess, parodies hyper-femininity, uses grotesque imagery and sonic material and applies these to being-woman in such a manner that, on their way from somewhere they arrive somewhere else, transforming being-woman into becoming-woman. Each encounter of being-woman in Rinse Cycle potentially brings us to a new place, a threshold, and an unanticipated understanding of what it is to be woman and what the assemblage of music-theatre enables being-woman to become. As a dynamic process, ‘becoming-woman’ opens out toward becoming-imperceptible, transforming negative into positive desire. In my final schizoanalytic move,

A MICROPOLITICS OF BECOMING-WOMAN AND RINSE CYCLE

65

I am suggesting that this creates the conditions for a politics that is lifeaffirming in the Deleuzian music-theatre assemblage, opening up the concept of ‘becoming-woman’ as the virtual ground of all change.

Acknowledgment I would like to thank Moya Henderson for providing me with her score, program notes and other materials associated with Rinse Cycle, and for her valuable feedback on this essay.

References Interview Henderson, M. (12 October 2014), Telephone Conversation.

Internet sources Ayres, E. (2013), ‘Can You Name a Female Composer?’, Engine Room Blog, 18 June. Available online: http://about.abc.net.au/2013/06/can-you-name-a-female -composer/ (accessed 28 March 2015). Cull, L. (2015), ‘The politics of becoming(-woman): Deleuze, sex and gender’, Academia.edu, 1. Available online: http://www.academia.edu/199365 /The_politics_of_becoming_woman_Deleuze_sex_and_gender (accessed 28 March 2015). Henderson, M. (2010), Rinse Cycle. Available online: http://www.youtube.com /watch?v=I5r-sdTb4Ls (accessed 20 February 2014). Henderson, M. (2013), ‘Music Bosses Remain Deaf to Distortion That Gender Discrimination Creates on Stage’, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 October. Available online: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/music-bosses-remain-deaf -to-distortion-that-gender-discrimination-creates-on-stage-20131010-2vb09. html (accessed 28 March 2015). Macarthur, S. (2013), ‘Off Key: Women Composers Get a Raw Deal on Play Rates’, The Conversation, 29 August. Available online: https://theconversation. com/off-key-women-composers-get-a-raw-deal-on-play-rates-17149 (accessed 28 March 2015).

Literature Antokolotz, E. (2014), A History of Twentieth-Century Music in a TheoreticAnalytical Context, New York: Routledge.

66

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Bergen, V. (2009), ‘Politics as the Orientation of Every Assemblage’, trans. J. Gilbert, New Formations, 68 (2): 34–41. Campbell, E. (2013), Music After Deleuze, London: Bloomsbury. Colebrook, C. (2002a), Understanding Deleuze, Crows Nest, Australia: Allen & Unwin. Colebrook, C. (2002b), Gilles Deleuze, London: Routledge. Colebrook, C. and D. Bennett (2009), ‘The Sonorous and the Haptic and the Intensive’, New Formations: Postmodernism, Music and Cultural Theory, 66: 68–80. Davies, B. (2014), Listening to Children: Being and Becoming, London and New York: Routledge. Deleuze, G. (2007), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1986), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. D. Polan, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Grosz, E. (1993), ‘A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics’, Topoi, 12: 167–179. Available online: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF0082 1854#page-1 (accessed 5 May 2014). Hasty, C. (2010), ‘The Image of Thought and Ideas of Music’, in B. Hulse and N. Nesbitt (eds), Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music, 1–22, Farnham, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Henderson, M. (2010a), ‘Program Note: Rinse Cycle’, unpublished. Henderson, M (2010b), Rinse Cycle, Musical Score, unpublished. Henderson, M. (2011), ‘Mr Kagel, 1974–1976: Much Larger Than Life’, Musicology Australia, 31 (1): 101–107. Hickey-Moody, A. and P. Malins (2007), ‘Introduction: Gilles Deleuze and Four Movements in Social Thought’, in A. Hickey-Moody and P. Malins (eds), Deleuzian Encounters: Studies in Contemporary Social Issues, 1–24, Houndmills, Hampshire and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kielian-Gilbert, M. (2010), ‘Music and the Difference in Becoming’, in B. Hulse and N. Nesbitt (eds), Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music, 199–225, Farnham, England and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Macarthur, S. (2002), Feminist Aesthetics of Music, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Macarthur, S. (2014), ‘The Woman Composer, New Music and Neoliberalism’, Musicology Australia, 36 (1): 36–52. Massumi, B. (1987), ‘Translator’s Foreword’, in G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, ix–xv, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Sheer, E. (2009), ‘Artaud BwO: The Uses of Artaud’s to Have Done with the Judgement of God’, in Cull, L. (ed.), Deleuze Connections: Deleuze and Performance, 37–53, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Surin, K. (2005), ‘Micropolitics’, in A. Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary, 162–163, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Woodward, A. (2007), ‘Deleuze and Suicide’, in A. Hickey-Moody and P. Malins (eds), Deleuzian Encounters, 62–75, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

3 Mattering Black Life: Time, The Rhizome and a Gullah-Geechee Politics of Rhythm Jay Hammond

Rhythm is the milieus’ answer to chaos … meter is dogmatic, but rhythm is critical. deleuze and guattari (1987: 313)

Meter can have rhythm in it, but groove is the real danger; groove placates, locks in; rhythm liberates, unlocks. Groove is so comfortable it can make you believe a lie. david pleasant (20 September 2015)

Deleuze, race and jazz ethnography This chapter is a reflection on the possibilities and limitations of an ethnographic Deleuzian analysis of jazz praxis in relation to race. While much Deleuzian scholarship does not address race overtly, it has been a budding topic of discussion in recent work (Saldanha 2007; Saldanha and Adams 2012). Deleuzian thought has brought a fresh approach to antiracist scholarship by seeking to understand race as a phenomenon through

68

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

materiality, the body and creative expression, rather than as a social construction through language, media or other forms of representation (e.g. Roediger 1991; Gilroy 2000, 2011; Wolfe 2006). This new materialist approach holds exciting possibilities for conceptualizing race beyond discourse and representation. However, in this chapter, I argue that linguistic-based approaches such as poststructuralism must be coterminous with a Deleuzian analysis of race. As such, I seek to enhance the material/ discursive theory of race proposed by cultural geographer Arun Saldanha and others without presenting theoretical schools as binary oppositions. I address these theoretical concerns through ethnographic instantiations of historical narrative, rhythm, time and musical genre in the African American jazz tradition. Harmonizing embodied and discursive theoretical approaches aligns with current anti-racist political struggles that draw equally from historically conflicting political agendas such as the Civil Rights Movement and Black Nationalism, most centrally the Black Lives Matter movement. In the same way that Saldanha singles out Deleuze’s concept of virtuality to understand the creative dimensions of race in his ethnography of trance music in Goa, India, I single out Deleuze’s concept of the rhizome in order to understand the temporal dimensions of race through an ethnography of jazz culture in the United States. Race is crucial to any robust discussion of the history and praxis of jazz. Recent scholarship on Deleuze and music has discussed jazz at length, sometimes emphasizing race, although other times defining jazz in terms of a more abstract, de-racialized notion of improvization (Gilbert 2004; Holland 2004; Swiboda 2004). When jazz is further specified in this work it has been circumscribed around a certain period of jazz, namely the free and experimental jazz of the 1960s and 1970s. This period is tacitly or overtly assumed to correlate more readily with Deleuze and Guattari’s thought. Within foundational ethnographic studies of jazz in the United States (Berliner 1994; Monson 1997; Jackson 2012), none have taken a Deleuzian approach, or even cited Deleuze and Guattari. This chapter seeks to enhance these literatures by exploring the gains and losses of Deleuzian analysis in relation to my own ethnographic fieldwork, where I focus on competing definitions of jazz history and praxis among jazz musicians in relation to issues of racial conflict in New York City; New Orleans, Louisiana and Charleston, South Carolina in the present day. In this chapter, I will highlight the musical philosophy and praxis of New York based, Georgia Sea Island born jazz drummer, choreographer, educator, artist and intellectual David Pleasant (born 1  January  1961).1 Pleasant’s rhythmic philosophy and praxis engages and challenges Deleuze

For more information, see Pleasant’s website http://www.davidpleasant1.com/ (accessed November 2015). 1

MATTERING BL ACK LIFE

69

and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, introduced in the opening section of A Thousand Plateaus (1987). Rhizomatic movement, for Deleuze and Guattari, is only possible when linear, quantifiable time is rejected. While Pleasant acknowledges the importance of such an understanding of time, he challenges the rejection of quantification in ways rooted specifically in the African American Gullah-Geechee tradition. Pleasant measures time when he employs the polyrhythmic clapping, stomping and drumming traditions of his native Gullah-Geechee culture in his musical and intellectual work, leading him to challenge Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987: 313) assertion that ‘meter is dogmatic’. These questions of time go beyond the musicological for Pleasant, moving specifically into the politics of race. Engaging in racial issues is not unique for many jazz musicians, but Pleasant is not limited to musical output and interviews with journalists like many jazz musicians. His work moves across mediums from music to dance to critical intellectual scholarship, making him an ideal interlocutor for developing the argument that race is produced simultaneously through discourse and the body. Addressing race has been an aspiration of Deleuzian scholarship on jazz, but not always a reality. In the words of cultural theorist Gary Genosko quoting Deleuze scholar Eugene Holland, ‘[Holland has argued that] improvizational jazz is the best concrete instantiation of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of schizophrenia, although one wonders which jazz and players he has in mind. [If it is] Anthony Braxton, free experimentation, and Black nationalism [then] yes [I agree]; but [if it is] Wynton Marsalis, black neo-classicism and the constraints of tradition – surely not’ (2001: 5). I take up Genosko’s call to address the problematic of race, but in the final section of this chapter I will take a different approach than he suggests by challenging the notion that genre categorizations such as Traditional or Experimental dictate the theoretical interest of a particular musical practice. Put simply, genres break down when examined ethnographically. Musicians often move between genres and see most attempts to categorize their work as constraining, even when genres such as Free or Experimental are meant to be boundless.2

Traditional jazz refers to the early jazz of 1920s New Orleans. It ranges from ecstatic social dance music to languid funeral dirges, and takes influence from Africa, Europe, Haitian Vodou and the Mardi Gras Indian tradition. The use of the music in Hollywood films, the rise of radio, as well as the career of Louis Armstrong brought wide commercial appeal to traditional jazz in the 1920s and 1930s. If early jazz is a mix of popular and folk music, the experimental jazz of the 1960s and 1970s is the apotheosis of jazz as high art. It is characterized most fundamentally by the idea of free improvisation, whereby musicians relinquish formal harmonic and melodic structures. Musicians employ avant-garde composition techniques from European classical music, and cite influences from South Asian ragas to Pan African mysticism to popular music. Experimental jazz came to be at a time of great social change across Europe and the United States, and was rooted in an ideology of radical freedom. 2

70

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Genosko is not alone in pairing experimental jazz with Deleuze and Guattari, and in one way, scholars are not wrong in their periodization. Historically speaking, Deleuze and Guattari’s two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia appeared in 1972 and 1980; a time when experimental jazz was as the forefront of its creative expression in New York. However, if we are to take race as a central analytic category, we cannot only address this period – now nearly four decades behind us – as necessarily canonically Deleuzian. Where ethnographic study becomes useful is in paying attention to the ways in which the quotidian practice and rhetoric of contemporary musicians often does not line up with neat genre categorizations. This approach complicates definitive claims on the relative value of one category over another. In addition, these categories all have histories that are inextricably tied to the history of race and racism in the United States, and working musicians are conscripted into navigating these histories on a daily basis. As such, what follows will set the scene of my ethnographic fieldwork, highlighting Pleasant’s place within it. By focusing on Pleasant throughout this chapter, I build on an approach in Africana studies and ethnographies of jazz that examines the music and intellectual discussions of African American musicians as themselves bodies of social theory (Berliner 1994; Monson 1997; Davis 1999; Porter 2002; Feld 2012; Jackson 2012). My discussion of Pleasant is based on two extended formal interviews, sustained informal dialogue and study of his artistic and intellectual output. Pleasant is working on a dissertation through the European Graduate School (Switzerland) that combines his background in and historical and intellectual knowledge of the Gullah-Geechee musical and cultural tradition with his work as a performer. Gullah-Geechee culture is an African American Culture from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Its musical traditions such as the Ring Shout, the Juba and the African American Spiritual hold profound and lasting importance for any consideration of the artistic, political and social import of black music in the United States. While New Orleans creole culture is generally cited as the primary source for the history of early jazz, Pleasant argues – and I agree – that Gullah-Geechee culture is just as crucial. While creole culture provided certain fusions of European and African musical elements, the Gullah-Geechee rhythms are present in early jazz as well. These Gullah rhythms performed on drums, stomps and claps as well as the Gullah language within Spirituals and other slave songs were used to communicate coded messages between slaves that were unintelligible to white slave owners and traders (National Park Service 2005; Matory 2008). Gullah-Geechee rhythm, therefore, played a key role in the long history of the bodily and cultural survival of the GullahGeechee culture. It is the metric quantification required in polyrhythm that gives Pleasant a unique opportunity to enhance Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of time, rhythm and the rhizome.

MATTERING BL ACK LIFE

71

Groove, meter and a Gullah-Geechee politics of rhythm Pleasant has performed in a wide array of styles, but I met him through a scene of musicians who play what they call traditional jazz in New York (trad for short). Trad includes the music of early jazz icons from 1920s New Orleans such as Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Sidney Bechet, but trad musicians also play music from the 1930s ‘Swing Era’ such as Benny Goodman as well as the vocal pop of the 1920s and 1930s such as Hoagy Carmichael and the Boswell Sisters. While they are playing music closely related to contemporary African American musicians such as Wynton Marsalis, the trad jazz community in New York is mostly young and white. This makes Pleasant an outlier as a more seasoned African American musician. Many trad musicians in New York studied in university jazz programs, where trad jazz is not a central part of their training. This is due in part to the fact that, musically speaking, trad jazz is far more accessible – and therefore less prone to the aestheticization and codification of the university and high art world – than the periods of jazz that came later. A central value in the trad jazz community is to shed the pretensions of formal training, and to forge more convivial modes of sociality around the music. Trad musicians prefer to play in settings where listeners can interact freely not just with the music, but with other listeners as well. Trad jazz has also become wildly popular among middle and upper class Americans; bringing unusually high payment to the highest level trad musicians for performances at private engagements around the globe. While the social values are central for some musicians, others play trad jazz because the gigs pay well. While Pleasant plays trad jazz, he also has profound criticisms of it. These criticisms are inextricably linked to his praxis and politics of rhythm, which he has developed through a lifelong engagement with the history, culture and art of his native Gullah-Geechee culture. Pleasant was raised on Sapelo Island off the coast of Savannah, Georgia. The population of the islands is majority African American, and until the middle of the twentieth century, many residents had limited contact with people on the mainland United States. As such, a distinctive island culture developed which is both unique to and foundational for wider African American culture in the United States. Gullah-Geechee culture has been a key site in Africana studies and Cultural Anthropology for understanding ‘Africanisms in American Culture’ from agricultural practices to language to artistic expression (Holloway 2005; Manigault-Bryant 2014). While cultural isolation has been a trope of the Gullah-Geechee literature, cultural anthropologist J. Lorand Matory (2008) has argued convincingly that it is one of the most dynamic and cosmopolitan in North America. Migration patterns between the islands and large cosmopolitan cities

72

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

such as New York and Philadelphia have been documented since the early twentieth century (Kiser 1932). Pleasant’s career exemplifies this level of artistic and cultural exchange on the islands. He moved to New York to pursue a career as a jazz drummer in the 1980s where the Loft Jazz experimental scene was in its twilight years (Heller 2012). His most well known recordings are with the free jazz saxophonist Charles Gayle. In the trad world, Pleasant plays with the band the Hot Jazz Jumpers led by guitarist Nick Russo. After his work with Gayle in the mid-1990s he continued playing drums but also focused his energy on projects outside the jazz world including choreography and critical intellectual scholarship. His work in dance is a product of his Gullah-Geechee heritage. The Ring Shout has seen a revival in GullahGeechee culture in groups such as the McIntosh County Shouters, and as Music Scholar Samuel A. Floyd Jr. has argued, ‘the shout [is] an activity in which music and dance commingle, merge, and fuse to become a single distinctive cultural ritual’ (1991: 50–51). While the jazz and dance worlds may be starkly separated today, Pleasant insists on maintaining their unity though his artistic praxis. As such, his jazz discography is fairly short which has limited his exposure to the world of jazz criticism, which is focused heavily on recorded music output. Pleasant’s career is, to say the least, boundary crossing. His output calls into question neat distinctions between traditional and experimental jazz, as well as those between music and dance. Not only has this made his work difficult to interpret and/or unknown to critics but he has also faced musical and artistic challenges with the musicians that he works with. This is directly linked to Pleasant’s technically advanced use of polyrhythm, which, as I will show, challenges Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of rhythm and time foundational to their concept of the rhizome. As a drummer, Pleasant’s style is very rhythmically complex. So much so, in fact, that many musicians – even very advanced ones – find it difficult to play with him. In my first formal interview with Pleasant (15 May 2015), his band mate Nick Russo (who is white) from the trad jazz band the Hot Jazz Jumpers was present. We started with the topic of Pleasant’s rhythmic approach: Russo (to Pleasant): The first time we played together, I knew that something was really interesting about your playing but I had no idea what was going on. I even thought, maybe I should just play with a different drummer next time . … Little did I know, your approach to rhythm was just way beyond my level. I didn’t realize at the time, and then we started playing with [vocalist] Miles [Griffith], and the way you and Miles played together made me realize I needed to really study your rhythmic approach. While many musicians consider Pleasant’s approach to be too complex, he argues that his approach is based on the rhythms he learned growing up

MATTERING BL ACK LIFE

73

in Gullah-Geechee culture, and that there is nothing inherently complex about them. In fact, in his experience, musicians are much more likely to protest to his playing than audience members: Pleasant: I’ve been on gigs where the audience response to what I was doing was very strong, but the musicians didn’t know what was going on. In the context of Gullah-Geechee culture, this makes perfect sense. In Gullah-Geechee culture, music is communal; it’s about pulling people in from a non-specified place. But when people study music in a certain way, they develop a routine ear for certain things, and the music becomes specified. And then when a rhythm comes along and breaks their routine, they think the rhythm is wrong. What’s happening though is that they’re failing to see the larger context. (15 May 2015) For Pleasant, this boils down to the problem that most musicians are trained to stay within a groove. Here, I will refer to the epigraph of this chapter in order to understand how Pleasant can nuance our understanding of Deleuze and Guattari. When Deleuze and Guattari say that ‘meter is dogmatic, but rhythm is critical’ (1987: 313), Pleasant disagrees. ‘Meter can have rhythm in it’, he says, ‘but groove is what placates’, in other words, it is groove that is dogmatic, not meter (15 May 2015). Why does Pleasant insist on defending meter in this way? While many of the rhythms he plays sound random, even to highly trained musicians, he is capable of notating and explaining the rhythms he plays in technical detail, which requires the metric quantification of musical time. His approach employs polyrhythmic patterns that are not commonly used – such as quintuplets – and then implying further polyrhythmic patterns over these subdivisions through articulation that further divide the beat. When Deleuze and Guattari say that ‘meter is dogmatic’ they are continuing their own thinking, coming out of Henri Bergson, that quantifying time necessarily yields logical errors. For Pleasant, quantification is not the problem. I will return to this issue of quantity and quality in greater detail below, but first, what Pleasant (15 May 2015) is referring to when he speaks of groove? There’s a big difference between what groove is, and what rhythm is. Rhythm is for creating ritual intensity. In popular music – including jazz – musicians want to keep the time square; at a right angle; on a grid. But if you listen to [Gullah-Geechee performers] … or early blues people you’ll see what I mean. Time isn’t square for them, it’s not about the grid; particularly in Gullah-Geechee music. There you’ll hear an accelerando that goes right along with what people are doing; whether it’s talking or dancing or eating; so it’s based upon how the musicians have situated themselves with the crowd, not some rigid form that the crowd must adhere to. This allows the time to have more motility and volatility, and for there to be more interaction between the performer and the audience.

74

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Pleasant’s critique of groove is, in many ways, a familiar critique of popular music. Like Frankfurt School cultural theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1944) and economist Jacques Attali (1985), Pleasant is concerned with how the mechanical reproduction of art is remaking non-mediated artistic expression. What he calls groove comes out of the repetitive rhythms of popular music, which gives a squareness or rigidness to live performance. Pleasant seeks to undo this rhythmic quality by subverting it in real time through polyrhythm. Like Nick Russo, many musicians feel frustrated by this at first because they are unable to understand what Pleasant is playing. It is at this precise moment of incommensurability that Pleasant’s rhythmic praxis becomes a politics of Gullah-Geechee rhythm. For Pleasant, the squareness or rigidness of time is not just a musical problem, it is a political problem as well. This is especially true in his engagement with the mostly white trad jazz scene. In less formal conversations, Pleasant has referred to contemporary trad jazz as Jim Crow music. Early jazz was first recorded in the 1920s, a time when state and local legislation known as Jim Crow laws were enforcing racial segregation in the American South. Pleasant asserts that the largely white musicians that perform trad jazz today, deliberately or not, are performing an exclusionary whiteness through rhythm. In other words, by emulating highly repetitive two beat grooves from early recordings, trad musicians are rearticulating what historian Karl Hagstrom Miller has called the ‘Segregation of Sound’ (2010), whereby the almost exclusively white recording companies and folklorists of the early twentieth century reflected the racism of Jim Crow segregation laws through the creation of genres such as all black race records and all white hillbilly records. Trad jazz musicians closely study these recordings as well as photographs and musical scores from the period. In doing so, they seek to accurately mimic the music, fashion and general aesthetic of jazz musicians from the early twentieth century. And so, while trad musicians have cultivated a new kind of sociality by eschewing conservatory canons, what often goes unaddressed in the scene is the political problem of reproducing Jim Crow segregation through sound in the twenty-first century. Part of the problem is that contemporary trad musicians work only from recordings, and that recording technology was not able to capture drums in its earliest instantiations, but Pleasant insists that the problem goes deeper than this. In a country where racial conflict is at a fever pitch in the form of heightened police violence, Pleasant sees correlations between the placation of groove and racism. ‘Groove is so comfortable it can make you believe a lie’, he says (20 September 2015). This lie is not just that musical time must be rigid, it is that African American time must be defined by white culture. Moving beyond music, we could think of this on many levels: from the strict timetables of prison life that are a daily reality for so many black

MATTERING BL ACK LIFE

75

people in the United States, to the way in which racist pseudoscientific thinking places non-white people in an earlier temporal stage of human evolution, to the fact that both the quality and quantity of sleep is divided unequally along racial lines in American society (Resnick 2015). To be black in America is to live under a conception of time that is not your own. So groove is not just musical, it fans out into all modes relation. Here is Pleasant (20 September 2015) once more on groove: Groove implies a particular kind of feel that people can easily acquit themselves to. There’s a comfort to it, it’s something expected. Rhythm isn’t about being locked into something; it’s about unlocking something. This is true in rhetorical rhythm too. Think about Deleuze talking or Martin Luther King talking or Harriet Tubman talking or John Brown talking. Their rhetoric moves people; it quickens people. Groove is not there to quicken you and move you. Groove is there to placate you; to keep you in your place. So when a musician plays trad jazz without opening their mind to Gullah-Geechee polyrhythm, they are consenting to the history of racist groove in America. Rhythm is powerful when it is unexpected, and blindly reproducing the recordings of the Jim Crow era denies the subversive power of rhythm. Ethnographically narrating this specific musical, racial and deeply historical conflict through a Deleuzian frame presents certain challenges. In the words of philosopher Claire Colebrook (2009: 2) ‘Deleuze and Guattari did seem to argue against the explanatory power of historicism . … [They] reject grand narratives and causal explanations’. However, when dealing with an ethnographic moment in which historical narratives are evoked in order to explain structural racism, how is a Deleuzian frame possible? When a black musician repeatedly claims that white musicians are unaware of the historical significance of his musical praxis, and that that historical significance can only be understood through a specific, chronological, historical narrative, wouldn’t Deleuze and Guattari’s work actually be invoked to undermine these arguments? In some cases, yes, but Pleasant actually sees great potential for Deleuze’s work in developing an anti-racist theory of rhythm. Pleasant is quite familiar with Deleuze’s writings, and in my work preparing this chapter he and I have discussed Deleuze’s work at length. The reader may have noted in the above quotation that Pleasant likens Deleuze’s writings to a kind of ‘quickening’ rhythm, and holds him in similar regard to the nineteenth-century abolitionist John Brown and to the civil rights heroes Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King Jr. In what follows, I delve farther into the similarities and differences between Pleasant and Deleuze, first in relation to rhythm and time, and then finally in relation to history and genre.

76

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Time, the rhizome and polyrhythmic ethics Pleasant’s take on rhythm, time and race creates a bit of a problem for a Deleuzian analysis, but also opens up exciting possibilities. While Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of time certainly has many overlaps with Pleasant’s, they come to different conclusions. In this section, I will present a reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘rhizome’ in relation to Deleuze’s reading of Henri Bergson’s theory of time in his work Bergsonism (1990). Within this, I will bring insights from Pleasant’s theory of time, which unlike Bergson or Deleuze and Guattari, comes out of a specific political concern with race relations in the United States, and is also informed by a lifelong performance practice that deals in minute technical detail with the manipulation of time through rhythm. When Pleasant insists on the rhythmic potential of meter through polyrhythm, he parts from Deleuze and Guattari. Through their concept of the rhizome, Deleuze and Guattari seek an alternative to evolutionary logic. This requires moving beyond linear notions of time, as well as chronological historical time, which they call arboreal. Arboreal root structures, like the genealogy model in intellectual history as well as literal genealogies that trace human relations through the tree model, are implied in evolutionary thinking. Deleuze and Guattari eventually say that they prove involution to evolution in A Thousand Plateaus (1987), but worry that involution still functions in a partially arboreal fashion at times rather than a purely rhizomatic system to which their thought aspires. The movement of matter and life within a rhizomatic theory of time do not follow from one mode to another in the fashion of evolutionary theory, whereby life differentiates itself by quantifiably divisible states. Rhizomatic movement does not go from less to more differentiated, nor does it adhere to the logic of the genealogical roots. Rhizome is an ‘anti-genealogy’ (1987: 11). The concept of the rhizome is heavily indebted to Deleuze’s reading of Bergson. In Bergsonism (1990) Deleuze writes that the ‘Bergsonian leitmotif is that people have only seen differences of degree where there are differences in kind’ (23). One of the many implications of this claim is that philosophers and scientists tend to collapse discussions of time into those of space, whereby a spatialized time only allows for differences of degree, dimension, position or proportion, and not those of kind. Deleuze goes on to note that this applies to theories of evolution, where the shift from one form of life to another – or most fundamentally, the shift from matter to life  – requires an intermediary that can only be understood through relations of more or less. And so the intermediary moment in time between forms of matter and forms of life becomes a problem. Bergson, Deleuze argues, seeks a notion of time that eradicates such an intermediary, a theory of time that operates on an entirely different logic than that of space. Bergson’s answer to this problem is his concept of duration, which sits at

MATTERING BL ACK LIFE

77

the very center of his entire philosophical project. Duration is a qualitative, non-atomized notion of time. If time is the scientific counterpart to space, duration is the philosophical counterpart to being. Duration is becoming; process, the collapsing of past, present and future. Bergson’s project in Creative Evolution (1907) is to understand the way in which evolution brought about human consciousness in particular, but more broadly the faculty of intellect, which he differentiates in kind from intuition. Duration is ‘the foundation of our being, and, as we feel, the very substance of the world in which we live’ (28). Understanding duration fully is outside the purview of science for Bergson, which lends itself too readily to the intellect. ‘The essential function of our intellect’ he says, ‘as the evolution of life has fashioned it, is to be a light for our conduct, to [ready us] for our action on things, to foresee, for a given situation, the events, favourable or unfavourable, which may follow thereupon. Intellect therefore instinctively selects in a given situation, whatever is like something already known; it seeks this out, in order that it may apply its principle “like produces like” ’ (1907: 29). Intellect then, by its very nature, functions by breaking matter into smaller and smaller parts, and then re-aggregating these points to create a kind of understanding, although one inherently limited to the use of matter by life. In order to understand duration, ‘we must do violence to the mind, go counter to the natural bent of the intellect’ (1907: 30). This is precisely Deleuze’s notion of a ‘philosophy of the real’; a set of concepts about concepts, which can only be understood by avoiding the linear notion of time implied by evolutionary schemas. To understand duration is to see that evolutionary time cannot in fact move through static stages, but is in a constant process of becoming. This is a very difficult concept for the human intellect to understand, because, as Bergson explains in the opening pages of Creative Evolution, the intellect conscripts modes of stasis onto the entire universe. This is precisely the function for which the intellect evolved, to strip away the elements of a phenomenon – living, non-living or conceptual – so that the most useful and expedient action can be taken in relation to it. However, unlike the majority of philosophers in the Western canon, Bergson does not privilege intellect or thought as the primary modes of understanding the universe for human beings. Thought, in fact, lags a good deal behind experience, and functions primarily in the service of practical action. Deleuze and Guattari come directly out of this tradition when they claim pointedly: ‘Thought lags behind nature’ (1987: 5). For Bergson as well as Deleuze and Guattari, the elevation of process above intellect is an ethical project that requires humility. The intellect (and therefore the philosopher or the scientist) no longer has pride of place. Pleasant works within the ethical frame of a philosophy of action as well, but his thinking parts ways with Bergson and Deleuze in certain respects.

78

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Most importantly, the qualification and the quantification of time are not mutually exclusive for Pleasant. This is the gist of his disagreement with Deleuze and Guattari on the issue of meter. This means that Pleasant’s musical practice is his process, and his intellectual project requires the quantification of time through polyrhythm. While Pleasant does not claim that this quantification is necessary for him to produce the rhythms, quantification is in fact useful when he translates the rhythms that he plays on the drums into an intellectual and rhetorical project that resists the grooved thinking that is racism in the United States, while elevating the historical and political significance of Gullah-Geechee culture within the history and praxis of jazz music. The political danger of groove is not that it is quantified, it is that it is comfortable, easy, the status quo. Take, for example, the way that Pleasant discusses polyrhythm: When I’m working with quintuplets [groupings of 5 notes in the space of 4 beats], the downbeat stays the same. But the nature of the 16th note and 8th note changes. So when I play within a pattern of five 8th notes, or five 16th notes where there would normally be four, in one sense, I’m moving faster. So if you’re a musician playing with me and I’m doing this, you’ll say, ‘he’s speeding up!’ But I’m not actually speeding up at all. The downbeat is always there, but I’m flying in different relative distances from the ground. Sometimes I touch the ground, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I go through the time and come up another way. But if you don’t have a larger understanding that what I’m doing is based on the Gullah-Geechee drum folk traditions, then you might accuse me of speeding up. (15 May 2015) In the context of the mostly white trad jazz musicians in my study, what Pleasant is saying to them is ‘I’m not following you; you follow me’. This polyrhythmic politics demands an open musical mind, which necessarily yields an open political mind. As a black musician who plays with white musicians often, Pleasant very clearly understands this rhythmic incommensurability as part of a larger incommensurability in American society; namely the inability for white people to hear what black people are saying. Polyrhythm requires the coexistence of different notions of time, which Pleasant (2012) links explicitly to Gullah-Geechee culture: Polyrhythm is the space I’m talking about, that’s the Gullah-Geechee space, that’s the African cosmology space; the conflation of past, present and future. This is polyrhythm. But instead of going past that space, or allowing that space to be an interruption, you jump into that space. And there is something new, unique and different; it opens up thought, it opens up the future. It opens a gateway to new consciousness, and ideas, and expression in rhythm.

MATTERING BL ACK LIFE

79

And so, Pleasant has a slightly different take on the relation between intellect and intuition than the Bergsonian one that laid the groundwork for Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome. Pleasant certainly agrees that thought lags behind nature, and that the nature of the human intellect is to aggregate matter and information toward action, in his case, toward political action that works against racism in the United States. When speaking about musical rhythm, Pleasant says that the incessant repetition of groove that feels so natural and comfortable is in fact very far from the actual rhythms of nature. ‘If our heartbeat was as incessantly predictable as groove’, he says, ‘we would be sick’ (15 May 2015). However, rather than developing a rhizomatic logic in order to push past the boundaries of the intellect, Pleasant elegantly fuses his artistic practice with an unabashedly quantified intellectual approach. He tells us that ‘this is the unique potential of the artist/intellectual’ (20 September 2015). Perhaps then Pleasant is much more in line with Bergson than Deleuze. Pleasant accepts the limitations of the intellect when he chooses to express his politics through rhythmic praxis in addition to conceptual analysis, while Deleuze addresses these limitations through concepts alone. Pleasant harnesses the power of the intellect by quantifying musical time, and he harnesses the power of duration through the fusion of past, present and future that polyrhythm allows. This leads us into our final discussion concerning history and genre. When intellect produces new rhythms by quantifying time through groupings of five and four at the same time that intuition produces new concepts such as duration by qualifying time, it becomes clear that race is both material and discursive (Wong 2004). Race is produced through rhythm in musical time, just as it is produced through discourse in linguistic time. As historical narrative and creative expression work together, race is produced through the mind as it is made through embodied processes.

Conclusion: History, genre and mattering black life Where Deleuze and Guattari seek to eradicate a linear conception of time, Pleasant seeks to understand how different conceptions of time can work together. This is the essence of his polyrhythmic ethics. This means that Pleasant cannot fully abandon chronological historical time, nor can he accept genre categories that lock styles and musical approaches to specific historical periods. As such, he cannot forsake tradition in the way that scholars such as Gary Genosko have argued a Deleuzian analysis of jazz should. When considering Pleasant’s career in the context of traditional and experimental jazz, it becomes clear that his work does not fit neatly into

80

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

either of these categories. By employing a methodology in this chapter that has combined ethnographic observation, historical research and biography, I have shown not only how Deleuze can help us think about race, but in how Pleasant can help us think about Deleuze. In this concluding section, I will contextualize Pleasant’s work within the Traditional/Experimental and Music/Dance divides. What does Gary Genosko mean when he places Anthony Braxton, free experimentation and Black nationalism in opposition to Wynton Marsalis and black neo-classicism in relation to questions of race in the United States? Marsalis and Braxton do indeed take different stances on the structure, practice and historical narrative of race in jazz. Marsalis has been perhaps the most visible case of the classicization of jazz music, and therefore the institutionalization of specific ideas about race in jazz. He has been a leading force in raising the status of jazz education in the United States through his work at Lincoln Center in New York. He is committed to the relation between jazz and black vernacular expression, most fundamentally to the blues. Pleasant agrees with Marsalis on this. When Pleasant speaks of the Gullah-Geechee culture of the Sea Islands, he often aligns their musical heritage with that of the blues of the Mississippi Delta. However, the way in which Marsalis actively sought out the European Classical music world in order to raise the profile of jazz does not cohere with Pleasant’s views on race. All too often in American culture, black culture is compelled to assimilate into the mainstream. Pleasant insists that black culture has a great deal to teach white culture, but white culture must first open its ears. Anthony Braxton comes out of a very different racial politics, one that Genosko rightly associates with Black Nationalism. Braxton’s formalized yet playful composition techniques connect black vernacular traditions, European serialism and aleatoric electronic composition, while his universalized yet circumscribed aesthetic and political philosophy connects theosophy, the occult and Afrocentric philosophy. Braxton has a highly unique conceptualization of African American music he calls Creative Music. In the words of his biographer Ronald Radano, ‘Creative Music [identifies] an array of radical expressions that paradoxically transcended racial limits while responding to impulses thought to emanate from an ancient African creative wellspring’ (1994: 2015). This African creative wellspring is a much less specific and codified idea about the political import of black sound than that of Marsalis; one inextricably linked to the Pan-Africanism of the 1960s. For Braxton then, blackness does not necessarily correspond to the blues at all, but is instead a cosmological and spiritual claim: one that is much less concerned with the political import of African American culture, than that of continental Africa. Pleasant takes issue with the way in which Braxton’s thought focuses solely on African continental history. ‘We have to understand how African

MATTERING BL ACK LIFE

81

culture in America has created something new’ (20 September 2015). African continental music and philosophies are important, but they don’t speak to the particular issues of African American culture. ‘Because the experimental people associate African American culture with slavery’, Pleasant says, ‘they are forgetting a really important element’ (20 September 2015). That element is not just the unique blend of African traditions that GullahGeechee culture brings, it is the particular political struggles that Africans have faced on the American continent, most centrally, slavery. GullahGeechee rhythm was a foundational tool through which African Americans were able to survive and flourish. Finally, the Juba and Ring Shout traditions are inseparable from rituals that involve dance, which was the foundation that led Pleasant to his work in dance and choreography, as well as his development of a pedagogical program called Riddimathon! based on Gullah-Geechee rhythms. Not only does Pleasant refuse the Traditional/ Experimental divide, he engages in dance and movement in a way unique to the jazz world, blurring the lines between music and dance. I hope it is clear by now that certain evocations of tradition, such as Pleasant’s take on Gullah-Geechee culture, can be every bit as Deleuzian as experimental forms of music, especially when those who develop these notions of tradition are in direct dialogue with Deleuze and Guattari. Sustained ethnographic engagement has enabled me to understand and present a certain interpretation of the significance of Pleasant’s work for thinking through Deleuze. Race is both a material and a discursive phenomenon, and what I have sought to highlight in this chapter is that race cannot be divorced from history, nor should it be. Too often, in Deleuzian or other new materialist writings, theoretical schools that emphasize history are cast as outmoded. For example, when Saldanha (2007: 8) says that ‘usually in the constructionist paradigm, instead of virtuality or creativity, the oppressive and rigid nature of racial boundaries is emphasized’, he is referring specifically to Cultural Theorist Paul Gilroy’s book Against Race (2000). Gilroy is presented as a constructionist here, who emphasizes the socially constructed nature of race as a way to call attention to its ultimate irrelevance. Saldanha (2007: 8) sees his work ‘in contradistinction to this kind of antiracism. [He calls] not for an abolishing of the idea of race, but its critical re-appropriation so as to combat racism more adequately’. I am intrigued by this approach as a researcher working on race and musical performance. However, I am wary of theoretical schools that dismiss social construction out of hand. Race does indeed have an embodied component, but it is also a historical social phenomenon. Like the categories of Music and Dance or Traditional and Experimental Jazz, these theoretical schools cannot be taken as absolutes in an ethnographic context. When Pleasant evokes the history of structural racism in the United States to critique the rhythmic praxis of white trad musicians

82

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

while insisting on the specificity of African American rhythm, he evokes both historical and embodied theories of race. I have brought this out by showing where Pleasant agrees and disagrees with Deleuze’s rhythmic philosophy, thereby showing the specificities of his anti-racist theory, praxis and politics. Like the Black Lives Matter movement, Pleasant’s anti-racism requires thinking of race as both embodied and historical. Race has a specific bodily comportment when he demands both the white musicians he performs with and the European cultural theorists he thinks with open their minds to the embodied and quantifiable specificities of Gullah-Geechee polyrhythm. Race is constructed through discourse when he evokes structural racism and the segregation of sound in relation to GullahGeechee history. Finally, Pleasant’s theory of time has shed new light on the intellectual importance of artistic practice. He refuses to polarize his work, and he parts ways with Deleuze when he insists on the ethical import of quantifying time. This puts him in a unique position in relation to the Deleuzian/Bergsonian gesture to collapse the boundaries between matter and life. This cannot be accomplished through the intellect alone for Pleasant. His intuitive praxis can be heard in his musical rhythms; they bring matter to life; they make the drum speak. His intellectual method can be seen is his writings; they make life matter; they speak like a drum. The former is embodied, the latter discursive; both move against groove and through rhythm.

References Interviews Pleasant, D., Queens, NY, 15 May 2015, interviewer Jay Hammond. Pleasant, D., New York, NY, 20 September 2015, interviewer Jay Hammond.

Internet sources Pleasant, D. (2012), ‘Riddimic Harmony’, Tedx Creative Coast Lecture. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-99f5fCyKg (accessed 15 November 2015). Resnick, B. (2015), ‘The Black-White Sleep Gap’, The Atlantic, 27 October. Available online: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/10/the-sleep -gap-and-racial inequality/412405/ (accessed 2 November 2015).

MATTERING BL ACK LIFE

83

Literature Adorno, T. and M. Horkheimer ([1944] 2007), ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, in S. Redmond and S. Holmes (eds), Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader, Thousand Oaks: Sage. Attali, J. ([1977] 1985), Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Berliner, P. F. (1994), Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bergson, H. ([1907] 1998), Creative Evolution, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Colebrook, C. (2009), ‘Introduction’, in J. Bell and C. Colebrook (eds), Deleuze and History, 1–33, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Davis, A. Y. (1999), Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, New York: Vintage. Deleuze, G. (1990), Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Feld, S. (2012), Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana, Durham: Duke University Press. Floyd, S. A. ([1991] 2002), ‘Ring Shout! Literary Studies, Historical Studies, and Black Music Inquiry’, Black Music Research Journal, 22: 49–70. Genosko, G. (2001), Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, Volume 1, London: Routledge. Gilbert, J. (2004), ‘Becoming-Music: The Rhizomatic Moment of Improvisation’, in I. Buchanan and M. Swiboda (eds), Deleuze and Music, 118–140, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gilroy, P. (2000), Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line, Boston: Harvard University Press. Gilroy, P. (2011), Darker Than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Heller, M. C. (2012), ‘Reconstructing We: History, Memory and Politics in a Loft Jazz Archive’, PhD. diss., Harvard University, Boston. Holland, E. (2004), ‘Studies in Applied Nomadology: Jazz Improvisation and PostCapitalist Markets’, in I. Buchanan and M Swiboda (eds), Deleuze and Music, 21–35, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Holloway, J. E. (2005), Africanisms in American Culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Jackson, T. A. (2012), Blowin’ the Blues Away: Performance and Meaning on the New York Jazz Scene, Berkeley and Chicago: University of California Press. Kiser, C. V. (1932), Sea Island to City; a Study of St. Helena Islanders in Harlem and Other Urban Centers. New York and London: Columbia University Press. Manigault-Bryant, L. S. (2014), Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah-Geechee Women, London and Durham: Duke University Press. Matory, J. L. (2008), ‘The Illusion of Isolation: The Gullah-Geechees and the Political Economy of African Culture in the Americas’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 50 (04): 949–980.

84

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Miller, K. H. (2010), Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow, Durham: Duke University Press. Monson, I. (1997), Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. National Park Service (2005), Low Country Gullah Culture Special Resource Study and Final Environmental Impact Statement, Atlanta, GA: NPS Southeast Regional Office. Porter, E. (2002), What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists, Berkeley; Chicago: University of California Press. Radano, R. M. (1994), New Musical Figurations: Anthony Braxton’s Cultural Critique, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Roediger, D. R. (1991), The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, London and New York: Verso. Saldanha, A. (2007), Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Saldanha, A. and J. M. Adams, eds (2012), Deleuze and Race, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Swiboda, M. (2004), ‘Cosmic Strategies: The Electric Experiments of Miles Davis’, in I. Buchanan and M. Swiboda (eds), Deleuze and Music, 196–217, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wolfe, P. (2006), ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4): 387–409. Wong, D. (2004), Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music, New York: Routledge.

PART TWO

Events

4 Singing Non-Human-Centric Relational Futures – The Algae Opera as an Assemblage Milla Tiainen

Some features of the performance seem readily familiar upon first inspection. A human performer is standing on a low, approximately meter-wide podium. Despite its modest proportions, it elevates her into a distinct position within the event’s spatial setting. This fashioning of space invites associations to such habits of separating the performers from the audiences that are endemic to a wealth of musical and other performance practices especially in Western countries. Both visual markers, such as bodily silhouette and long black dress, and the vocal sounds she emits link the performer to attributes normatively considered as female and feminine. They thus make her identifiable as a she. For those auditor-spectators acquainted with the musical soundscapes of Western cultures, the sonorities being emitted are likely to signal classical singing. They do not display such traits as a wideranging tessitura or elaborate melodic lines typical of much vocal music in the still culturally dominant eighteenth- and nineteenth-century repertoires of Western opera and lied. Comprising passages and glissandi, which move within a rather narrow compass of tones mainly in the middle register for a classically trained female voice, they nonetheless refer to classical music through timbres, modes of projection, and the ways they audibly resonate within the singer’s facial cavities and body. While these elements lend themselves to categorization, the performance event also includes several components that exceed the conventions of classical vocal performing and escape immediate recognition. To begin with,

88

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

the familiar figure of the female singer is partly transformed by a complex mask and suit structure that she is wearing on her face, head, shoulders and back. Composed of numerous transparent tubes that entangle into ornamental shapes in the head part, this structure is not recognizable as any preexisting or well-known medical, scientific, media-technological or performing arts-related piece of equipment. Invoking impressions somewhere in between fashion, sci-fi, organic forms and science labs, it connects intimately with the singer’s embodied voice production. After a closer look, she is singing into the structure’s head piece. Furthermore, as soon as the habit of centering on and foregrounding human figures arguably characteristic of so-called neurotypical human perception (Manning and Massumi 2014: 3–7) gives way to a wider mapping of the event, it can be noticed that this ensemble of singing body, voice and technology relates to other elements. These include a glass cabinet standing in front of the podium and attached to the singer via the tubes. The cabinet is filled with glassy bottle-shaped containers. They contain plants or plant-like entities immersed in liquid. The performance also involves another human actor who is engaged in activities not frequently encountered in a musical performance. Standing behind a table next to the podium in a white lab or chef’s coat, this performer is feeding the tubes into various algae samples. If they feel so inclined, audience members can taste the samples within bits of sushi that the chef/performer prepares. Thus, although alluding to a number of quite established markers of classical vocal music performances, the occasion in question also forges unprecedented relations between a variety of human and more than human1 elements: artifactual, technological, social, sonic, alimentary, human bodily and nonhuman organic. Elaborating on the notes that I made after attending a performance in September  2012, the description above concerns the performance, voice and media art project The Algae Opera (2012). The project had its début on 22 and 23 September 2012 on the courtyard of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London where it figured as part of the London Design Festival. It has subsequently been performed in 2013 at Dulwich festival for project Co.Futures and in 2014 at the BEYOND BIENNIAL event held in Amsterdam. The key initiators of The Algae Opera are London-based designers and conceptual artists Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta – henceforth BurtonNitta – together with a group of further collaborators. The latter span from the British classically trained mezzo-soprano Louise Ashcroft and musical composer Gameshow Outpatient to scientific experts as well

Building on Brian Massumi’s take (2013: xxiii), my usage of the notion of more than human does not refer to forces superior to humans, but to activities and ‘contingencies belonging to any number of categories’ as well as to the excess of ‘currently human potential’. 1

SINGING NON-HUMAN-CENTRIC REL ATIONAL FUTURES

89

as algae, which are a photosynthetic plant-like organism (BurtonNitta 2012–2015). As BurtonNitta state on their website, The Algae Opera is one among such various projects in which they have collaborated with individuals and organizations across science, choreography, performance, design and architecture. The themes that they hope to examine within this cross-disciplinary collaborative practice are both pressing and sweeping. They include the future world and human evolution in conjunction with scientific and technological developments, current relationships among humans and non-human nature, and the search for such newly symbiotic ways in which we might begin to live with nature (BurtonNitta 2012–2015). In The Algae Opera, these questions incarnate first and foremost in the arrangement of mutual relations between Louise Ashcroft’s body and voice, the algae, and the new biotechnological suit that BurtonNitta designed for the singer to wear. The tubes of this suit transport the carbon dioxide in the singer’s breath to the algae with intensified efficiency. The purpose of the relational arrangement is to explore such new modes of food production  – concerning the needs of humans but potentially also those of other animals – that would for their part enable the continuation of life and an ecologically more sustainable future on planet Earth. The fictional narrative attached to this ‘micro-opera’, as Ashcroft (2012a) calls the project in her blog, considers our world in 2060. It imagines us living in an age where the algae have become the world’s chief food supply. Despite its speculative futuristic tone, this narrative clearly reverberates with the already unfolding reality of ecocrises: overpopulation, climate change, decreasing biodiversity and ecosystemic mutations incited largely by human actions. Displaying an experimental and no doubt playful orientation, The Algae Opera aims to enhance the growth of the algae. It does so by allying them with the  purpose-built technology and the heightened amounts of carbon dioxide  that Ashcroft is able to release through it because of her lung and vocal capacities shaped by her classical musical training. In its unique ways, The Algae Opera signals two presently emerging tendencies in Western performing arts practices. First, it can be seen to reach toward a world where anthropocentrism – in the sense of the self-evident primacy accorded to humans over other-than-human living and inorganic beings – is replaced with more immanently reciprocal understandings of how we coexist with natural, technological and other not exclusively human forces. As performance artists and theorists Tuija Kokkonen and Alan Read (2014) have exemplified, performance projects with this sort of orientation do not aspire to non-anthropocentric modes of being only at the level of their subject matter or discursive themes. They aim to make this shift also within the performance praxis proper by including nonhuman beings – whether particular physical locales, animals, recording and transmission media, or indeed plants – as veritable co-constructors of the events and the aesthetic or perceptual qualities of the performance (see also

90

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

e.g. Scheer 2012). Second and relatedly, The Algae Opera points to the need to reconsider the nature of performances after decades of reliance upon theories of signification and symbolic mediation. To build on insights to performance offered by the Gilles Deleuze-inspired cultural theorist Andrew Murphie (2009: 221–222), The Algae Opera for its part indicates that artistic performances do not only materialize or comment upon ideologies, identities and other signifying contents. They are also capable of distributing and redistributing life across their participants and loci of occurrence. The life that performances distribute refers here to shifting capacities for relating, sensing and perceiving, acting on and responding to other beings, and becoming anew (see also e.g. Cull 2009, 2012). In this chapter, I engage with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of assemblage delineated mostly in their A Thousand Plateaus (1987) in order to investigate the transversal connections across human and ­non‑human entities as well as the multiple facets and powers of musical or music-involving performance that The Algae Opera illustrates. My primary aim within this investigation is to show how the concept of assemblage may enhance understandings of the currently changing material and social functions of artistic, including musical, performances related for instance to environmental and non-human-centric thinking. The Algae Opera both exemplifies and generates changes of this kind. My discussion draws on heterogeneous actualizations of The Algae Opera. These range from my notes and recollections on the performance in 2012 to the trailer and other video clips of the project available on BurtonNitta’s website and YouTube. They also include statements and commentaries on the project by its human participants along with online magazine and newspaper articles. By bringing a number of these actualizations in touch with assemblage, I hope to arrange an encounter within which the project, this concept, conceptions of performance and the broader discussions of music and sound studies might each become enriched in terms of their constituting aspects and capacity to deal with ongoing artistic and social developments. While my article focuses on one artistic project, I seek to embrace both its singularity – unrepeatable combination of elements – and some of its links to Deleuze and Guattari’s process philosophy, changing forms of musical performance, and music and sound research (cf. Massumi 2002: 18).

Exploring assemblages in performance, Deleuze and voice studies Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage is a key component of their process ontology. It is central to their insistence on transversal, that is, register-crossing co-constitutive relations between diverse kinds and

SINGING NON-HUMAN-CENTRIC REL ATIONAL FUTURES

91

scales of being. Accordingly, in their take the terms of an assemblage may span human agencies, bodily movements and parts, ideas, customs and significations, as well as heterogeneous more-than-human forms of being ranging from microorganisms and non-human animals to vegetal life, mineral and chemical processes, and technological procedures and apparatuses. Assemblages are not extensive, in the sense of principally spatial and numerical, collections of human individuals or other entities that would have a preformed identity prior to their coming together. Rather, the characteristics and ways of acting of an assemblage’s terms are reactivated and at least somewhat modulated by their reciprocally influencing relations during their togetherness. The partakers of an assemblage thus (re)gain their modes of acting and being relative to each other. The identity of the whole assemblage consists of this overall connectivity (e.g. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 8; DeLanda 2006: 29, 33–34). Assemblages produce reality, for instance musical performances, on the basis of how the features and capacities of their participants appear and reconfigure within their mutual relations and what they are capable of doing together while interconnected. If the elements of the assemblage alter, its productivity and connections to its outside will shift accordingly. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 8) put it, ‘[a]n assemblage is precisely this increase in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands its connections’. The ways this chapter repeats the concept of assemblage with a difference (see e.g. Deleuze 1994: 41, 55, 222) will contribute new insights and methodological potential to Deleuze- and Guattari-inflected music and performance studies. Previous investigations in these areas as well as some approaches drawing looser inspiration from Deleuze and Guattari have already worked with the concept of assemblage. This has occurred in relation to reviewing jazz improvisation, Western operatic singing and music-related identity formation, for instance (see Tiainen 2008, 2012; Nesbitt 2010; Born 2011). What I attempt to do is further specify the different part-aspects of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept, such as the distinctive notion of relations it entails, and their usefulness for music and performance studies. My analysis also has connections to another burgeoning cross-disciplinary research area that can be called voice studies. These approaches do not consider the voice simply as a topic of study. In addition to scrutinizing specific vocal practices, they seek to harness the voice as a critical methodology through which it is possible to re-examine various issues central to human and social sciences. These include agency, corporeality, technology, perception, gender, cross-cultural perspectives and questions of social power (e.g. Neumark et al. 2010; Tiainen 2013; Thomaidis and Macpherson 2015). I endeavor to contribute to these debates by widening the scope of voice’s oft-noted environmental nature, its inherent moving in between or across subjects and locations (see e.g. Cavarero 2005), toward non-human-centric understandings. The ramifications of these understandings for voice studies are yet to be carefully explored.

92

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

The next section of the article examines the formation processes of The Algae Opera through the notion of relations of exteriority. As will be elaborated, this notion can be seen as integral to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage. It emphasizes that to the extent that relations bring something new to the world by affecting and reactivating the terms implicated in them, their nature cannot be fully predetermined by the already existing properties of the relating terms. Rather, relations push these terms outside of themselves by inciting them to vary: to act and react in ways specific to the given relation. At the same time, the entities retain their mutual difference or heterogeneity (see e.g. Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 9–10, 82, 85–86; DeLanda 2006: 29, 33–34). The subsequent chapter section before the conclusions addresses the ways in which The Algae Opera comprises material and semiotic flows and connections (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 22–23). Put differently, I will examine the project in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that each assemblage is at once a machinic assemblage of material elements or processes and a semiotic system: a collective assemblage of enunciations. I will end this analytical section by linking The Algae Opera and the concept of assemblage to the three ecologies. This conceptualization by Guattari (2000) insists on multi-way co-determinations between the levels of individual, society and environment. In Guattari’s view, the interrelations across all these levels need to be transformed in order to try and solve the current ecological crises. His concept provides further aid for considering the emergent non-human-centered and environmentalist tendencies in The Algae Opera.

Transformative relations of exteriority in The Algae Opera The title of The Algae Opera couples two things: a natural organism quite divergent from the forms and functioning of human bodies and a mostly Western domain of music that carries high culture or elitist connotations. These terms do not belong together in a conventional sense. At the sheer level of linguistic meaning-making, the combination is unusual. Rather than in the semiotic interplay of the generic labels algae and opera, my interest lies in the relations that formed during the project between Louise Ashcroft’s specific body and voice, the vocal lines crafted for her to sing, the biotechnological invention, the environmental preoccupations of the project, and the algae as active and responsive material formations – as vibrant matters, to follow new materialist political theorist Jane Bennett (2010). How were these interrelations arranged and modulated in the course of preparing the project? How did the implication in them affect the human

SINGING NON-HUMAN-CENTRIC REL ATIONAL FUTURES

93

singer and the non-human life forms? What actualized from their relations with each other as well as with the biotechnology? Although their participation in The Algae Opera was discernible by other means and will be discussed below, the algae of course cannot communicate about their involvement in the project’s relational composition through human language. Let us hence start from the ways in which the project’s human partakers have verbalized these interrelations. On BurtonNitta’s website, the opening phrase of the page devoted to this project declares that in The Algae Opera, ‘[a]n opera singer is transformed with biotechnology to form a unique relationship with algae’ (BurtonNitta 2012–2015). This statement seems to put the biotechnological device in the primary transforming role in how the project’s relations among musical performance, human soundmakers, technology and biodiversity took shape. To this extent, it echoes certain traditional notions of mediation. These (see Kember and Zylinska 2012: 19) have assigned media – represented in the present instance by The Algae Opera’s biotechnological construct – as intervening and negotiating third factors between otherwise distinct entities (here above all the human body/voice and the algae). The suit and the tubes comprising the project’s purpose-built technology did of course enable the relations between Ashcroft’s body and breathing and the algae to assume the form that they did. By transporting the CO2 in the singer’s breath to the algae in a focused manner, the apparatus shaped the conditions, intensity and effects of the human–vocal sound and non-human nature connections so central to The Algae Opera. This role notwithstanding, the biotechnology was by no means the only entity involved whose distinctive powers of acting and reacting contributed to the project while at the same time re-emerging from their mutual relations with the other participating terms. A further comment by BurtonNitta highlights this aspect. In it, they first extend the sources of transformation in The Algae Opera from the biotechnology to the wider physical and cultural forces figuring within the project. They then stress the specific role played in their view by the involvement of a classically trained opera singer: The role of transformation in The Algae Opera is a physical and cultural one. We [Burton and Nitta] identified the opera singer as the perfect body morphology for the production of algae. The singer’s large lung capacity was perfect to exhale the maximum CO2 to feed the algae. To facilitate the process further, the singer, Louise Ashcroft, worked with composer, Gameshow Outpatient, to re-design her singing technique. (BurtonNitta 2012–2015) When suggesting that the changes in The Algae Opera are both physical and cultural, BurtonNitta apparently stress the wider reciprocal relations within which the material processes of the algae, those of the singer’s body

94

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

and voice, as well as the habitual cultural functions of opera shifted during the project. Instead of prioritizing the technological design, their account above deems the different elements of the performance as equally, albeit variably, important participants in its constitution. Their remarks about Ashcroft reinforce, in turn, the point made initially above concerning the contribution of each involved element to the encounter at stake and their simultaneous modulation in connection with one another. On the one hand, BurtonNitta claim that it was the capacities Ashcroft’s body and voice had acquired previous to the project during her operatic training and musicianship which made her an ideal co-performer and nourisher of the algae. On the other hand, they also note how Ashcroft’s vocal technique transposed in the course of the project. It was the relations into which she entered in The Algae Opera – including her relations with the biotechnology, the algae, the composers and the project’s thematic contents – that changed her ways of singing. This change was driven by the need perceived by Ashcroft and the musical composer team to retune her voice technique so that the CO2 in her breath would feed the algae even more efficiently. In her blog post concerned with her engagement in The Algae Opera, Ashcroft (2012a) provides further insight into this process of vocal and musical retuning. She explains: For me, the algae opera project has been about finding new things and re-examining old things. One of the biggest vocal challenges I have faced is considering how the opera voice, traditionally built for the size of the opera house and therefore requiring a sustained line, is re-built to the food needs of the world’s population as defined by the algae mask. Due to this re-design, the musical structure and performance practice of today’s operatic tradition shift and enter a future state … This design means I have to make a significant shift in the use of breath. The algae mask … requires a non-reflexive breath cycle to maximise CO2 output. This means the singer needs to take the breath cycle to the point of collapse. In today’s opera tradition, this type of breath cycle is considered inefficient and undesirable due to the issues surrounding sustainability and aesthetic. However, in The Algae Opera, a breath cycle based on a point of collapse is considered efficient and ultimately desirable, for it produces more algae. Ashcroft’s depiction details some of the transformations that her singing underwent within the relational set-up of The Algae Opera. She makes clear that she did not join the project equipped with a definitively formed vocal technique. Instead, her co-functioning with the mask and the plant entities, and the project’s aim to enhance the growth of the latter for the purpose of exploring ecologically sustainable forms of food production urged changes in her corporal thinking, to borrow a term by musical performance scholar

SINGING NON-HUMAN-CENTRIC REL ATIONAL FUTURES

95

Frank Cox (2002: 129). With this term, Cox refers to the co-determinations, rather than separability or set hierarchy, between body and mind in acts of performing. Echoing this idea, Ashcroft accounts how The Algae Opera inspired shifts in her views of voice production and operatic performance praxis as well as in her bodily performances of sound. With regard to the motor-sensory acts contributing to voice production, it was particularly her habits of projecting the voice and breathing that Ashcroft had to bodily-mentally relearn. The intensified breathing cycle – as opposed to a reflexive one closer to natural breathing – that she adopted during this process may have transgressed ideas of vocal beauty and sustainability prevalent in Western classical music and operatic culture. As Ashcroft indicates, however, the emerging new workings of her body and voice began to connect to aesthetics and sustainability in a fresh sense. When linked with the algae, her singing demonstrated the capacities of human breath emanating from a specifically acting body to invoke sensations and (re)actions in non-human life forms, and to thus advance their existence and thriving. What Ashcroft and BurtonNitta’s views on some of The Algae Opera’s key contributors – the singer, the vocal sounds and CO2, the algae and the biotechnology – point to is the usefulness of the notion of relations of exteriority presupposed by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage. As philosopher Manuel DeLanda (2006: 11) proposes in his study of social processes inspired by this concept, there are two advantages to viewing relations as exterior in comparison to assuming them as interior: that is, as determined comprehensively by the relating terms’ existing properties or by a supposedly closed system of relations that they act in. The first advantage is that when regarded as exterior, relations allow a certain degree of autonomy to the connecting terms. These terms cannot be reshaped in any which way by their relationship to other entities. Rather, each term brings its specificities – physical, cultural, historical, mental – and already stratified capacities to bear on the relations in which it participates and on their ensuing effects. The effects may concern other partakers of the given relations or the overall outcomes of the relational event. This partial autonomy of relating terms came to the fore above when both BurtonNitta and Ashcroft stressed the importance of Ashcroft’s operatic training to her capabilities within the project. It was also the specificity of the algae, however, that moved the project’s interrelations. As Ashcroft (2012a) notes in her blog entry, the objective of sonically enhancing the algae changed her – and the project’s other human makers’ – ‘relationship to pitch, tone and vocal colour’. This was because of her and the composers’ discovery that the algae responded differently to different vocal frequencies. It was not only their rate of growth but also their flavor on the axis of bitter and sweet – as experienced by the human project team and audience members who tasted the algae – which varied relative to changing tones.

96

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Thus, by responding in a dynamic fashion to Ashcroft’s and the musical composer’s efforts, the distinctive, although not self-contained, propensities and qualities of the algae were partly responsible for what happened in The Algae Opera in terms of vocal expression, organic life, nutritional prospects and evolving performance practices. The second advantage of relations of exteriority complements the first aspect. It posits that while human and other entities have a level of autonomy within relations, the given relations, too, display capacities irreducible to any of the involved terms. As Deleuze (1991: 98) puts it, ‘relations do not have as their causes the properties of the [participating terms] between which they are established’. Phrased more positively, relations are genuine participants of assemblages. This is because the tendencies and attributes of entities unfold differently in mutually divergent webs of relation and co-functioning: assemblages. Elaborating on Deleuze-Guattari and previous process philosophers such as William James and Alfred N. Whitehead, cultural theorist Brian Massumi (2009: 3) states accordingly: ‘The region of occurrent relation is a point of potentiation. It is where things begin anew’. Re-beginnings of this sort mobilized by relations of exteriority manifested themselves in The Algae Opera. This took place when the algae exhibited accelerated growth and altering flavors while Ashcroft began to sing with a recomposed technique, and the aesthetics and tasks of operatic performance transferred from an exclusively human sociocultural realm into a reality of interspecies relationships and imminent ecocrises. Besides helping to engage with The Algae Opera, the idea of relations of exteriority may benefit the developing methodologies of musical performance and voice studies in a broader sense. With regard to this, the notion has again two benefits. First, it provides carefully theorized support for studying how the musical, social, bodily and other features of performances arise both from these events’ individual components – musicians, vocal cords, technologies, sonorities, spaces, plant bodies, scores, listeners – and from the often surprising productivity of their interrelations. Second, when employed as part of the concept of assemblage, the idea of exterior relations encourages an open and modest attitude as regards the kinds of relations and elements that may shape a performance. Some recent studies of music as performance, such as Nicholas Cook’s wideranging Beyond the Score (2013), have re-examined musical performances also in Western art music culture and research as processes unfolding essentially from interactions. Cook’s views of this relationality build, for example, upon psychologist Keith Sawyer’s notion of ‘the emergent’, which originally pertains to theatrical performance (see Cook 2013: 233–235). Yet the focus of this concept is limited to human interactions. In Deleuze and Guattari’s scheme, the skills, bodily organizations, conceptualizations and other characteristics of human music-makers may reconfigure in relation to eminently heterogeneous entities and registers of reality. This is

SINGING NON-HUMAN-CENTRIC REL ATIONAL FUTURES

97

an important observation with respect to such aims of expanding Western performing arts practices beyond human-centered thinking and acting that The Algae Opera exemplifies.

Performance as machinic connections and collective enunciations When describing the vocal textures of The Algae Opera that were crafted in collaboration with Ashcroft, the composer Gameshow Outpatient aka Matt Rogers recounts that ‘[w]e wanted to create a vocal ritual overly focused on breath as much as singing, since breath is a fundamental connection between singer and algae … We wanted the piece to represent an imaginary “folk” music, born of a Human/Algae symbiote culture where breath itself is the revered symbol of existence’ (BurtonNitta 2012–2015). One notable thing in these views is that on the one hand, Rogers points to the very physicality of the project’s voice–singer–breath–music–and–non-human nature relations, which were tried out while composing Ashcroft’s vocal lines. In terms of the growth of the algae and the wider questions about biodiversity and the earth’s food supplies, which the project associates with these organisms, the flows of CO2 exhaled by the singer via the mask form indeed the elemental link between her and the algae. When it comes to the other aspect of this material bond, the purported impact of Ashcroft’s singing on the taste of the algae, BurtonNitta (2012–2015) explain that they adopted this idea from recent research into sonic food enhancement. Based on empirical evidence, this research conducted in the area of experimental psychology argues for a strong trans-sensory or cross-modal dimension in human food consumption in the sense that hearing high frequencies while eating accentuates the sweetness of the food. Low frequencies enhance, in turn, the taste of bitterness in the consumed products (see e.g. Fleming 2014). These findings were tested during the successive performances of The Algae Opera by offering tasters of the algae to the project’s audience members in the form of a sushilike meal prepared by the white-coated actor/chef Samuel Lewis who performed next to Ashcroft. As BurtonNitta (2012–2015) clarify, ‘[t]he two acts of the opera are composed to consist of sound pitches to enhance the audience’s taste of bitterness and sweetness as they eat’. On the other hand, the composer Rogers’ comments above also point to the discursive and conceptual aspects of The Algae Opera. Referring to the project’s previously mentioned narrative about our world in the year 2060, he invokes an imaginary future time where the notion of culture has shifted from a self-evidently human-dominated sphere of communication and production into symbiotic practices. In these practices of a symbiote culture,

98

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

the dependence of the humans on their codetermining relations with more than human entities, and the aim to foster the existence of all the relating parties instead of just human life, are both acknowledged and elaborated. In addition to the generative force of relations discussed in the previous section, the insights of Rogers and BurtonNitta cited above call forth further ways in which Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage may act as a useful concept when analyzing the changing practices of performing arts and seeking to expand the methodological paths of performance, music and voice studies. Specifically, The Algae Opera can be examined through Deleuze and Guattari’s twofold definition of assemblages as both machinic assemblages and collective assemblages of enunciation. In Deleuze and Guattari’s view, assemblages necessarily consist of elements of content as well as of expression (1987: 85–86, 504). It is the content elements that constitute machinic assemblages. Deleuze and Guattari characterize this dimension of assemblages as pragmatic systems (504). These systems comprise the actions and passions or reactions of the material bodies, agents and things that co-function in an assemblage. As Deleuze and Guattari (88) summarize, a machinic assemblage is composed of ‘an intermingling of bodies reacting to one another’. It is, in turn, elements of expression that constitute collective assemblages of enunciation. These elements comprise signifying statements and acts that stem from and produce regimes of signs (88, 504–505). The regimes of human signs, from linguistic discourses to other symbolic systems, provide the most obvious case in point. Deleuze and Guattari’s characterization of the signifying elements as collective is a way of stressing that no productions of meaning are independent from broader contextually varying possibilities of meaning-making or expressive of just single individuals’ voice and thought processes, let alone fully conscious will. Enunciations, and enunciating subjects, individuate on the basis of wider conditions of possibility concerning language use and other symbolic acts, which give rise to articulated ideas and sense (80, 84–85). As Deleuze and Guattari (84) put it, ‘the collective assemblage is always like the murmur from which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice’. Every enunciation is unique or singular to the extent that its exact circumstances of emergence cannot be repeated. Nonetheless, each of them is filled with connections to larger social domains and elaborations of meaning and to previous as well as future enunciations that are likewise part of these constellations. Through these emphases, the notion of collective assemblages of enunciation clearly approximates to theorizations of  language, signification and subjectivity by several of Deleuze and Guattari’s contemporaries in continental philosophy, such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault or Hélène Cixous. It may seem that this bifurcation of assemblages into materially based pragmatic processes and semiotic processes reiterates such long-term and

SINGING NON-HUMAN-CENTRIC REL ATIONAL FUTURES

99

vastly problematized binaries of Western thinking as matter/meaning, body/mind, and material/discursive. Yet the further premises of Deleuze and Guattari’s approach work to dissolve this impression. They also bring out the distinctive nuances of their stance in comparison to some contemporaneous philosophical undertakings. First of all, both the content and the expressive elements have according to them such dynamics of acting and taking form that are specific to their respective nature and irreducible to one another. Hence, they cannot subsume or exhaustively determine each other. The moving and sensing human – or other than human – bodies of artistic performances may be signified as well as affected in terms of their actions with discursive appellations. Nevertheless, their processes and capacities remain qualitatively different from such linguistic expressions with which they interact. As media and cultural theorist J. Macgregor Wise (2005: 85) puts it in his exposition of the concept of assemblage, ‘the reciprocal actions of content and expression’ always ‘have to pass a gap of non-resemblance’. When it comes to examining such apparently non-anthropocentric and transversally working performance projects as The Algae Opera, the emphasis that Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage places on the activeness of material entities seems crucial. Indeed, The Algae Opera for its part highlights how the elements of artistic performances and the changes they may engender do not relate exclusively to practices of symbolic meaningmaking. They also comprise material, machinic actions and passions. The material components and outcomes of this project are pronounced in terms of their roles and variety. They range from the transmissive capacities of technologies beyond the human, the unique biotechnological structure, to processes of photosynthesis and cross-modally perceived movements of plant life, the growing and flavorsome algae. They also encompass the muscular, respiratory, sonic, technical and perceptual acts of different human bodies and actors including the singer, BurtonNitta, the actor/chef, the auditor-spectators and the composer. When attending The Algae Opera at the courtyard of the Victoria and Albert museum, I was among other materialities struck by the peculiar new blend of material and aesthetic features in Ashcroft’s vocalizations. In this blend or bodily-vocal assemblage, traits of classical technique familiar to me, such as the strong resonance of the voice in the singer’s head cavities, intermixed with less familiar characteristics. The latter included her accentuated breathing and attendant fairly brief, yet emphatic, vocal phrases. The trailer video on BurtonNitta’s website (2012–2015) offers a glimpse of the aurally, kinesthetically and visually idiosyncratic qualities of Ashcroft’s voice usage. What The Algae Opera also highlights in relation to the notion of machinic assemblage is the potential and actualities of material interconnections across scales. To elaborate on Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 69), in this project culturally developed vocal, compositional and

100

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

design techniques rub shoulders with decidedly physical and chemical interactions. Meanwhile, audience perceptions of aesthetically hybrid folk song interlace with new gustatory experiences and global environmental concerns. Consequently, an important part of this project’s fascination lies in how its attempts to effect a shift from human-centered thinking and relations with non-human nature toward more symbiotic modes do not occur solely on the level of narrations and metaphors, although they happen on these levels too. Rather, the project functions as what Tuija Kokkonen (2015) has called inter-species performance. The Algae Opera involves more-than-human forms of life as agents or at least quasiagents (Bennett 2010: viii) of the performance. This is because they have tendencies of their own, which incite and redirect the project’s human activities, such as the formation of Ashcroft’s vocal lines or the nature of audience participation. This type of interspecies performance may transpose the ways we signify humanness, non-humans, ecological sustainability and human responsibility. Simultaneously, it foregrounds both humans and morethan-humans ‘as open series of capacities and potencies’ on the level of material actions and interrelations, to use a formulation by new materialist thinkers Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (2010: 10). The Algae Opera demonstrates that what ‘we’ humans are – in Deleuze-Guattari’s terms our actual states from sensory experiences to being nourished – and what we might become – in their terms the virtual dimension of our being consisting of moving potentialities that will result in as yet undefined actualizations – are irrevocably entangled with actors and powers in excess of the human. In addition to shedding light on The Algae Opera, the notion of machinic assemblage suggests new lines of approach for music and performance studies more broadly. As is well known, the body as a cultural construct and dynamic effect of social categorizations of gender, sexuality, race and other axes of difference has for long been a prime topic of interest in cultural and feminist musicology, ethnomusicology and opera studies (e.g. McClary 1991; Koestenbaum 1993; Kisliuk 1998; Leonardi and Pope 1996; Smart 2000, 2004; Cusick 2009). This preoccupation with bodies has extended into analyses of the singing voice and body as materializations – whether docile or subversive – of gender and sexual norms (e.g. Cusick 1999) and into the burgeoning studies of music as performance (e.g. Cook 2003; Dogantan-Dack 2012; Cook 2013: 288–336). Yet these examinations have continued to approach the body as first and foremost a ‘signifying body’ (Cook 2013: 288–307). They have mostly examined bodies as products and producers of musical and wider historical-cultural meanings. What machinic assemblage as a key component of Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage encourages is an expansion of attention to human performing bodies’ always relational materialities. These materialities span from ‘evolving corporeal practices’ (Alaimo and Hekman 2008: 3) to

SINGING NON-HUMAN-CENTRIC REL ATIONAL FUTURES

101

cross-modal perceptual experiences (for existing examinations in this vein, see e.g. Tiainen 2008, 2013; Manning 2009; Rahaim 2012). Moreover, the notion of machinic assemblage, as exemplified by The Algae Opera, extends the scope of music and performance studies toward a wealth of more-than-human material formations that transact with humans. Some existing approaches in voice studies (e.g. Brophy 2010; Tiainen 2013) have enquired into the ways in which human vocal expressions often elaborate on sounds from other-than-human portions of reality. These may include animal sounds or those of transportation, industrial and other technologies. Machinic assemblage makes it possible to also explore how human voices affect their environments and human, as well as non-human, beings in terms of the latter’s material characteristics and vibrancy. To refer back to my suggestion in the present chapter’s introductory section, vocalmusical performances may thus be studied increasingly as distributors of life in a Deleuzian-Guattarian sense: of relations, actions, passions and potentials for being. While consisting of material connections, The Algae Opera also demonstrates how performance projects are composed of and in collective enunciations. These operate in relations of mutual influence with each other as well as with the given performance’s material elements. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987: 87) assert, on the one hand the signifying acts of an assemblage introduce themselves into the material components with which they connect. This refers to how they may encourage the material terms to take shape in particular ways and/or endow them with specific meanings. On the other hand, the material elements actively elicit collective enunciations as means to make sense of them. Elements of content and expression hence constitutively affect one another without losing their mutual difference (1987: 87). As regards The Algae Opera, it is possible to discern various types of collective enunciation in how the project has been made sense of by its human makers and other commentators. One of these types of expression links the project to the ways in which future technologies, such as this project’s biotechnology and the new modes of food production it hints at, can enhance the lives and physical capacities of humans beyond the present state. This tendency of meaning-making is noticeable for instance in Ashcroft’s two blog posts that concern, respectively, the whole project and her own character in the opera’s fictional world of the year 2060. In the post regarding her character, Ashcroft (2012b) mentions how the vocalizations and CO2 emissions of the project’s singer exemplify the future ‘biological modification’ of humans, including their methods of food intake. In the text concerning the entire project, she (2012a) argues that The Algae Opera helps to imagine the future re-designing of ‘our bodies’ which will enable us to live differently and acquire novel sensory experiences in connection with our eating rituals.

102

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Similar tones appear in several introductions of the project in online magazines. One case in point is an article in Wired, an American magazine focused on the impact of emerging technologies on culture, politics and the economy. When explaining the thrust of The Algae Opera, this article (Clark 2012) mentions, too, the tailor-made modification of human bodies that is pursued for the sake of realizing a more intimately symbiotic relationship between them and their physical environments (see also Celiberti 2013). These statements could be associated with so-called transhumanist ideas, which have been criticized by some prominent developers of post-human-centered thinking, such as the Deleuze- and Guattari-inspired feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti (2013). The criticisms at stake pertain to the way that transhumanist perspectives advocate the further enhancement of human life even to the point of the imagined transcending of all the current bodily and material constraints of human existence. Arguably, these kinds of approach conceive of human relations with non-humans mainly as means toward that end. This does not diverge radically from older instrumentalist and exploitative notions of other-thanhuman nature and technology in Western societies. I suggest, however, that there is another type of collective enunciation also discernible in the signifying acts that contribute to The Algae Opera as an assemblage of material and expressive elements. These views likewise stress the need to refashion current ways of living in the future. Yet, they do not necessarily consider the living and inorganic others of humans as mere enhancers of human survival. These signifying acts range from the ways that the members of the project’s team underline the co-constitutive powers of the algae and the opera singer to the notion of symbiote culture introduced by the composer Rogers. They also surface in some of the further published commentaries on the project, such as when an article in the Huffington Post (Schwartzman 2012) maintains that The Algae Opera and other projects by BurtonNitta speculate in a cutting-edge fashion ‘on the future of humans and our impending unavoidable, and hopefully mutually beneficial interactions with bacteria, algae and biological systems’. Instead of positing humans as ontologically distinct or primary, the enunciations in question seem to insist on the following: if we want life on earth to continue and perhaps even to prosper, it is vital to grasp the always-already interlinked character of individual human bodies and lives, cultural and social practices including their approaches to nature, and the well-being or lack thereof of natural environments. In The Algae Opera, this inter-implication of individuals, society and nature actualizes through the project’s relations between human performance-makers, the ‘new performance paradigm’ (Ashcroft 2012a) that this interspecies opera seems to promote, and the natural life forms that act as its co-constructors. To this extent, the material and signifying features of this performance-assemblage approximate to Guattari’s thesis

SINGING NON-HUMAN-CENTRIC REL ATIONAL FUTURES

103

on the three ecologies. Throughout the essay of the same name, Guattari stresses the necessity of exploring the multi-way influences between social institutions, individual bodily and mental dispositions, and the processes of environments beyond human control if we wish to find solutions to the ecocrises of the current techno-scientific, advanced capitalist age. He notes that since the three registers or ecologies of individual, society and environment interrelate, the change toward more sustainable practices, whereby the term sustainable refers to natural-ecological, societal and mental aspects, can begin from any register. As part of the social register, artistic and cultural undertakings can also engender change of this kind (see Guattari 2000: 35–45). It is arguably in order to generate sustainability in Guattari’s sense that the collaborative artistic, musical, mediated and more-than-human performances of The Algae Opera gesture toward less human-centered relational futures.

Beginning anew in the middle In this chapter, I have sought to demonstrate how such contemporary performing arts projects as The Algae Opera, which combine realms from musical praxis and interactive design to scientific experiments, and which replace the centrality of humans with co-constitutive relations between heterogeneous beings, can be examined with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of assemblage. In effect, I would claim that performances informed by these sorts of orientations require the kind of relational ontology entailed by their concept in order to become graspable. However, the notion of assemblage does not illuminate The Algae Opera’s dynamics in a one-way manner. I also attempted to show how a consideration of this project reanimates Deleuze and Guattari’s concept by plugging it into new relations and contexts. These pertain for example to the singing voice and the transforming practices of Western operatic performance. Furthermore, I would offer that the Deleuzian-Guattarian assemblage ultimately helps to rethink and study the workings of a variety of artistic and other sociocultural performances, not just of those with explicit non-anthropocentric and environmentalist or ecocritical (see e.g. Allen and Dawe 2015) leanings. Hence, as a wider methodological guideline for music, performance and sound studies, the notion of assemblage urges us to always begin in the middle (see Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 293; Tiainen et al. 2015: 40–46). That is, it encourages a shift of focus from supposedly discrete terms that only secondarily interact to their very encounters and relational co-reconfiguring. It is from within such encounters that both the various elements of musical and performative instances and what we can understand by music and performance repeatedly emerge anew.

104

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

References Internet sources Ashcroft, L. (2012a), ‘Sitting Next to the Future’, 29 August 2012. Available online: http://www.currentsongoftheday.com/2012/08/sitting-next-to-future .html (accessed 30 March 2016). Ashcroft, L. (2012b), ‘Made for Life’, 16 September 2012. Available online: http://www.currentsongoftheday.com/2012/09/made-for-life.html (accessed 30 March 2016). Burton, M. and M. Nitta (2012–2015), BurtonNitta: Projects by Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta. Available online: http://www.burtonnitta.co.uk/algaeopera .html (accessed 30 March 2016). Celiberti, S. (2013), ‘“Algae Opera” Nourishes Algae with a Singer’s Breath’, NextNature, 1 March 2013. Available online: https://www.nextnature.net/2013/03 /algae-opera-nourishes-algae-with-a-singers-breath/ (accessed 6 June 2016). Clark, L. (2012), ‘Algae Opera Imagines a World Where Algae Produces Earth’s Food Supply’, Wired.co.uk, 27 September 2012. Available online: http://www .wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-09/27/algae-opera (accessed 30 March 2016). Fleming, A. (2014), ‘How Sound Affects the Taste of Our Food’, Guardian, 11 March 2014. Available online: http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle /wordofmouth/2014/mar/11/sound-affects-taste-food-sweet-bitter (accessed 30 March 2016). Schwartzman, M. (2012), ‘Algae: Art’s New Star’, Huffington Post, 10 September 2012. Available online: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/madeline -schwartzman/algae-art_b_1948925.html (accessed 6 June 2016)

Literature Alaimo, S. and S. Hekman, eds (2008), Material Feminisms, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Allen, A. and K. Dawe, eds (2015), Current Directions in Ecomusicology, New York and London: Routledge. Bennett, J. (2010), Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Born, G. (2011), ‘Music and the Materialization of Identity’, Journal of Material Culture, 16 (4): 376–388. Braidotti, R. (2013), The Posthuman, Cambridge: Polity. Brophy, P. (2010), ‘Vocalizing the Posthuman’, in N. Neumark, R. Gibson and T. van Leeuwen (eds), Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media, 361–382, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cavarero, A. (2005), For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, trans. and with an introduction by P. A. Kottman, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cook, N. (2003), ‘Music as Performance’, in R. Middleton, The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, 204–214, New York: Routledge.

SINGING NON-HUMAN-CENTRIC REL ATIONAL FUTURES

105

Cook, N. (2013), Beyond the Score: Music as Performance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coole, D. and S. Frost, eds (2010), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Cox, F. (2002), ‘Notes Toward a Performance Practice for Complex Music’, in C.-S. Mahnkopf, F. Cox and W. Schurig (eds), Polyphony and Complexity, 7–132, Hofheim: Wolke Verlag. Cull, L., ed. (2009), Deleuze and Performance, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cull, L. (2012), Theatres of Immanence: Deleuze and the Ethics of Performance, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cusick, S. G. (1999), ‘On Musical Performances of Gender and Sex’, in E. Barkin, L. Hamessley and B. Boretz (eds), Audible Traces: Gender, Identity, and Music, 25–48, Zurich and Los Angeles: Carciofoli Verlagshaus. Cusick, S. G. (2009), Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. DeLanda, M. (2006), A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity, New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Deleuze, G. (1991), Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, trans. and with an introduction by C. W. Boundas, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Dogantan-Dack, M. (2012), ‘The Art of Research in Live Music Performance’, Music Performance Research 5: 34–48. Available online: http://mpr-online.net/ Issues/Volume%205%20[2012]/Dogantan-Dack.pdf (accessed 6 June 2016). Guattari, F. (2000), The Three Ecologies, trans. I. Pindar and P. Sutton, London: Continuum. Kember, S. and J. Zylinska (2012), Life after New Media: Mediation as a Vital Process, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kisliuk, M. (1998), Seize the Dance! BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Koestenaum, W. (1993), The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, London: GMP. Kokkonen, T. (2015), ‘Performance, Ecology and Relationships: One History from the Anthropocentric Performance to the Interspecies Performance’, unpublished keynote lecture in Performance and Ecology: Case Finland seminar, 11 April, German Language School, Berlin. Kokkonen, T. and A. Read (2014), ‘Chronopolitics with Dogs and Trees in Stanford’, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts 19(3): 56–57. Leonardi, S. and R. Pope (1996), The Diva’s Mouth: Body, Voice, Prima Donna Politics, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Manning, E. (2009), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

106

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Manning, E. and B. Massumi (2014), Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Massumi, B. (2002), Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2009), ‘Of Microperception and Micropolitics: An Interview with Brian Massumi, 15 August 2008’, Inflexions: A Journal of Research-Creation 1(3): 1–20. Available online: http://www.senselab.ca/inflexions/volume_3/node _i3/massumi_en_inflexions_vol03.html (accessed 1 June 2016). Massumi, B. (2013), ‘Prelude’, in E. Manning (ed.), Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance, xi–xxiv, Durham and London: Duke University Press. McClary, S. (1991), Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Murphie, A. (2009), ‘Performance as the Distribution of Life: From Aeschylus to Chekhov to Vjing via Deleuze and Guattari’, in L. Cull (ed.), Deleuze and Performance, 221–239, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Nesbitt, N. (2010), ‘Critique and Clinique: From Sounding Bodies to the Musical Event’, in B. Hulse and N. Nesbitt (eds), Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music, 151–180, Aldershot: Ashgate. Neumark, N., R. Gibson and T. van Leuuwen, eds (2010), Voice: Vocal Aesthetics in Digital Arts and Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rahaim, M. (2012), Musicking Bodies: Gesture and Voice in Hindustani Music, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Scheer, E. (2012), ‘Posthuman Scenarios and Performative Media’, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 17 (3): 23–33. Smart, M. A., ed. (2000), Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Smart, M. A. (2004), Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera, Berkeley: University of California Press. Thomaidis, K. and P. Macpherson, eds (2015), Voice Studies: Critical Approaches to Process, Performance and Experience, New York: Routledge. Tiainen, M. (2008), ‘Corporeal Voices, Sexual Differentiations: New Materialist Perspectives on Music, Singing, and Subjectivity’, in S. Miezkowski, J. Smith and M. de Valck (eds), Sonic Interventions, 147–168, Amsterdam: Rodopi. Tiainen, M. (2012), Becoming-Singer: Cartographies of Singing, Music-Making, and Opera, Turku: University of Turku. Tiainen, M. (2013), Revisiting the Voice in Media and as Medium: New Materialist Propositions. NESCUS – European Journal of Media Studies, Autumn 2 (2): 383–406. Available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/NECSUS2013.2.TIAI (accessed 30 March 2016). Tiainen, M., I. Hongisto and K.-K. Kontturi (2015), ‘Framing, Following, Middling: Towards Methodologies of Relational Materialities’, Cultural Studies Review, 21 (2): 14–46. Wise, J. M. (2005), ‘Assemblage’, in C. Stivale (ed.), Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts, 77–87, Chesham: Acumen.

5 Queer Transversal: The Spectacle Adam Lambert Elizabeth Gould

Like all television shows, Fox Network’s American Idol manages its discourses carefully, particularly the narratives it creates for its contestants. In part because dissident sexualities are not among discourses the show allows, American Idol packaged and commodified season eight runnerup Adam Lambert as glam rock spectacle. This media spectacle ‘Adam Lambert’, an extravagant moving and sounding visual and aural display embraced by audiences despite ultimately losing the competition to modest and modestly talented Kris Allen, normalized Lambert’s music persona and performances in relationship to dominant discourses of gender and sexuality in that 1970s and 1980s glam rock was performed almost exclusively and most visibly by straight and straight-presenting men dressed in outlandish costumes and make-up. Ubiquitous and apparently hegemonic corporate-orchestrated spectacles do not go uncontested, however, and may be mobilized as sites of resistance. By enthusiastically taking up a persona associated with the historical spectacular music of glam rock while simultaneously exceeding its conventions and disrupting its narratives, Lambert set the terms of his transversal spectacle Adam Lambert in contradistinction to ‘Adam Lambert’. My analysis, consisting of close readings of Lambert’s performances from the semi-finals through the finale of American Idol’s season eight, deploys performance theorist Philip Auslander’s (2004) performer-centered approach in dialogue with his analysis of glam rock to enact ‘a work of performance analysis informed by theory’ (Auslander 2006b: 7, 6). Refracted through a queer feminist lens, I situate Lambert’s Idol performance(s) of gender and

108

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

sexuality in terms of film theorist Elena del Rio’s (2008) concept of spectacle as ‘an affective-performative [moving] force that upsets the balance of power between performer and world, performer and audience’ (6), and Auslander’s (2006a) concept of musical persona co-created by performer and audience through processes of social interaction. By exceeding glam rock sensibilities in which it/he was produced, and concomitantly resisting that spectacle’s heteronormativity as an ethical act of Deleuzian transverse thinking, the (queer) spectacle Adam Lambert affirmed and intensified difference in ways that put the ‘incommunicable in communication’ (Bogue 2007: 5) as it/he zigzagged across American Idol’s media spectacle ‘Adam Lambert’, actualizing queer subjectivities as a (musical) life worth living.

Queer/music/performance/spectacle I take up the phenomena queer and music as forms of becoming in terms of creative acts of difference in the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s sense of difference in itself, ‘a pure difference that is not reducible to identities, the actualities that present themselves to us’ (May 2003: 148). Difference provides the ground on which identities are founded (not the other way around), lying ‘beneath and within the passing identities to which it gives rise’ (146). It is encountered in Deleuze’s virtual world, which is to say that while it is not actual it is real, where the past exists virtually in the present. Actualizing the virtual (becoming) takes place in the real world, giving actualization a political dimension that involves modes of resistance, escape, subversion, transformation, ‘revolutionary sidestepping’ (Massumi 1992). Indeed, Deleuze (2004) asserts that ‘revolution is the social power of difference’ (208), which carries an ethical imperative. We are responsible for thinking more and beyond, creating concepts that respond to what would limit and constrain. As (transversal) becoming, ‘queering’ for ‘Deleuze and Guattari is predicated on a queer revolution – sexual and social – and the becomingrevolutionary of the queer’, not in terms of identity, but rather as ‘[h]omosexual desire  ­ …  distributed and mobilised otherwise’ (Conley 2009: 25, 26) toward what Deleuze describes as ‘the progression of a future sexual becoming’ (2004: 288). In this way, queer homosexual desire moves transversally (ethically, creatively), connecting the sexual and the social in and as a permanent revolution. Lambert’s American Idol performances actualize queer as a performative ontological effect of sexuality,1 invoking and deploying contingent relations of subjectivity With her theory of gender performativity, Judith Butler (1993) argues that gender/sexuality does not reflect an inner or intrinsic essence, but rather is an ontological effect (in that gender/ sexuality is a condition of possibility for human existence) produced by compulsory repetitions or ‘performances’ of gender/sexuality in relation to coercive gender/sexuality ‘norms which precede, constrain, and exceed the performer’ (234). 1

QUEER TRANSVERSAL: THE SPECTACLE ADAM L AMBERT

109

that open, in the Deleuzian sense (Deleuze 1994), the problematic field of sexuality precisely where and when it intersects with politics. Similarly, music as becoming constitutes ‘a virtual field of differences that can be actualized in many different ways. It is a rich virtual field, one that … is inexhaustible’ (May 2005: 156). Beyond the actual in music, actual sound, actual performance and reception, the virtual involves thinking and hearing potentialities, that which is actualizing, becoming. Deleuze conceptualizes music in terms of auditory sensation exerted by forces directly on the body without mediation. The body registers music as ‘sensations never before experienced, perceptions of what has never been perceived before or perhaps cannot be perceived otherwise’ (Grosz 2008: 22), intensifying and moving it outside of itself. This is not the body’s outside, but something and somewhere qualitatively different, moving toward chaos, those forces from which the body otherwise ‘so carefully shields itself in habit, cliché and doxa’ (21). Rather than vanquishing chaos, however, music, ‘the most seductive of the arts’ (29), ‘erotic and enticing’ (31), glories in it as the means by which we express desire, ontological as well as sexual: ‘I become in the sensation and something happens through the sensation, one through the other, one in the other. And at the limit, is the same body that, being both subject and object, gives and receives the sensation’ (Deleuze 2003: 31, original emphasis). Music, as a ‘double articulation brings together a block of content … and a form of expression (becoming)’ (Buchanan 2004: 15, 16). It is ubiquitous in everyday life (DeNora 2000), manifesting subjectivities, signaling here Lambert’s becomings in the world. Musical pleasure is performative in that it is an effect rather than a facet of productive desire that begins with and in the body for audiences as well as performers. Describing this in relationship to singing, sociomusicologist Simon Frith (1996) argues that ‘the sheer physical pleasure of singing’ is such that: for many singers what they are singing, a word, is valued for its physical possibilities, what it allows the mouth or throat to do. The singer finds herself driven by the physical logic of the sound of the words rather than by the semantic meaning of the verse, and so creates a sense of spontaneity: the singing feels real rather than rehearsed; the singer is responding (like the listener) to the musical event of which they are part, being possessed by the music rather than possessing it. (193) When listeners participate in this pleasure by singing along, they create individualized versions of songs emanating from their own singing bodies. Because ‘the voice is the sound of the body’ (193), we never hear it disembodied; rather we assign to voices bodies that are at least

110

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

raced, gendered, classed. Individualizing the voice, we hear it as a person, someone we think we know because we like her or his voice. Hearing voices of popular singers as ‘personally expressive’ (Frith 1996, original emphasis), our ‘musical pleasure lies in the play we can make of both being addressed, responding to a voice as it [sings] to us (caressingly, assertively, plaintively), and addressing, taking on the voice as our own, not just physically, … but also emotionally and psychologically taking on (in fantasy) the vocal personality too’ (198, original emphasis). Succinctly, we take pleasure in the singer’s voice as it interacts with the authorial voice of the lyricist or songwriter, and the protagonist, the ‘I’ of the lyric. That music listening is active (DeNora 2003), musicking in ethnomusicologist Christopher Small’s (1998) terms, is demonstrated in how musical performance is co-created through social interaction of performers and audiences (Frith 1996; Auslander 2004). Indeed, popular and classical music performers ‘perform an identity in a social realm’ (Auslander 2006a: 101), rather than a lyrical text or musical score. Supported by makeup, costumes, sets, lighting, props and visual effects, they pose rather than act (Frith 1996) in their performances of various ‘musical personae’. Audiences consume the performance (persona), as opposed to the performer (person), and actively co-create meanings through interpretation of the performer’s ‘rhetoric of gestures in which … bodily movements and signs (including the use of the voice) dominate’ (205). Performance, then, is an ‘expressive event’ that is always already bodily in that it is ‘the actualization of the body’s potential through specific thoughts, actions, displacements, combinations, realignments’ (del Rio 2008: 9). This is the Deleuzian body, ‘an assemblage of forces or affects’ (3) that connects and interacts with other forces or affects. As powers of the body, affects are ‘creative and performative in their ceaseless activity of drawing and redrawing connections with each other through a process of … becoming’ (3). Rather than occupying a specific subject position, the active, moving body ‘emerges as an assemblage of virtual and actual expressions with the capacity to affect and to be affected by other bodies’ (12). Performative in that it does not pre-exist, but rather is an effect of its own becoming, the spectacle Adam Lambert’s body generates, produces and performs queer ontological worlds, presenting itself as a ‘shock wave of affect’ (10). The affective dimension of performance is where the body mobilizes its powers to affect and to be affected, and resistance to normalizing imperatives may occur. For Deleuze and Guattari (1987), the body is implicated in molar and molecular formations or subjectivities, what del Rio describes as planes. With the molar plane, consisting of sedimented

QUEER TRANSVERSAL: THE SPECTACLE ADAM L AMBERT

111

identities, the body is subject to regulatory dualisms and relations; with the molecular plane, consisting of ‘impersonal and unformed becomings’, it functions ‘as an excessive, destabilizing intensity responsive to its own forces and capacities’ (9). Invoking the molecular in and through performance, the spectacle Adam Lambert’s performing body exceeds and destabilizes social, cultural or political requirements, enacting potentialities of a Deleuzian transversal, deterritorializing ideological constructs of hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity in ‘a certain wreckage of ideological stability, the debris of a passing storm, as former corporealities and their relations appear profoundly altered or dislocated’ (16). That the spectacle created by the performing body sounds and appears difficult and real (‘sincere’) is crucial to the success of popular singers like Adam Lambert who are ‘continuously registering their presence’ through an erotics of performance ‘haunted by questions of sexuality’ (Frith 1996: 212). As a site of and for desire, Lambert becomes ‘a spectacle of face and voice’ (del Rio 2008: 184) actualized as ‘a moving performance with the power to de-form and trans-form the physical/aesthetic’ (5) and cultural/ ideological forces at play. Indeed, del Rio’s concept of spectacle foregrounds mobility through which musical expression becomes a dimension of resistance to oppression. Traversing and transgressing boundaries and norms, the spectacle Adam Lambert disrupts artistic relations of power as a Deleuzian transversal, at once social and political, implicated by ethics and aesthetics. As a way of thinking, Deleuze’s transverse way ‘opens new possibilities for life’ (Bogue 2007: 5). As a way of doing, it involves ‘a practice of making transverse connections, of assembling multiplicities that affirm their differences through connections’ (2) in a process that is ‘relational and continuous’ (Galliford 2010: 238) in that transversals are always moving, always ‘in process’. Finally, as a way of moving, it delineates ‘the diagonal path connecting incommunicable ways, a trajectory that intensifies the distance between locations’ (Bogue 2007: 2), situating music performance as politics. Distilled to ‘the idea that (a) transversals as (b) lines of flight which (c) deterritorialize (d) molar entities’ (Galliford 2010: 239), I map Deleuzian transversality here in terms of (a) the spectacle Adam Lambert as (b) affective expressive event which (c) subverts and exceeds (d) heteronormative discourses of music (rock and glam) and gender/sexuality even as it (c) asserts and articulates (d) queer eroticism, desire and subjectivity as a musical life worth living. First activating three deterritorializing relays, the transversal turns perpendicularly to then zigzag diagonally across and through them (see Figure 5.1).

112

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Relays

Rock Masculinity

Heteronormativity/ Faux Homosexuality

Queer Eroticism/ Desire/Subjectivity

‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ (1965) Rolling Stones; Week 1 Billboard Hot 100

‘Black or White’ (1991) Michael Jackson Week 2 Michael Jackson

‘Ring of Fire’ (2006) Dilana Robichaux Week 3 Grand Ole Opry

Week Number Theme Week 4 Motown

‘Tracks of My Tears’ (1965) Smokey Robinson & Miracles

Week 5 Popular iTunes Downloads

‘Play That Funky Music’ (1976) Wild Cherry

Week 6 Birth Year

‘Mad World’ (2003) Gary Jules

Week 7 Cinema Songs

‘Born to Be Wild’ (1965) Steppenwolf

Week 8 Disco

‘If Can’t Have You’ (1977) Bee Gees

Week 9 Rat Pack Standards

‘Feeling Good’ (2001) Muse (1965) Nina Simone

Week 10 Rock Music Week 11 Contestant Choice

‘Whole Lotta Love’ (1969) Led Zeppelin ‘Cryin’ (1993) Aerosmith

Week 12 Season Reprise

‘Mad World’ (2009) Adam Lambert

FIGURE 5.1  The Spectacle Adam Lambert.

Glam narratives and American Idol Beyond host Ryan Seacrest’s and judge Simon Cowell’s homophobic onscreen exchanges challenging each other’s heterosexuality, ‘sexuality is striking in its absence on American Idol; it is one of the only identity markers not plainly exploited for its audience potential’ (Meizel 2011: 47). Ethnomusicologist Katherine Meizel attributes this in part to the show’s

QUEER TRANSVERSAL: THE SPECTACLE ADAM L AMBERT

113

privileging the voice over the body in that dance is not a component of the competition, as well as its marketing as family entertainment. Further, she argues that Lambert’s apparent disaffection from his southern California hometown, and disinclination to highlight his being Jewish left the show with little option than to construct a narrative about him as glam rocker. The narrative was plausible inasmuch as Lambert had previously performed with the touring and Los Angeles casts of the musical Wicked, and had sung Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ for his initial Idol audition. Moreover, signifiers of glam rock such as ‘flamboyant poses, aggressive sexuality … are so similar to many stereotypes about gay men’ that Idol producers may have assumed that the audience would conflate glam with gay so they ‘could exploit [Lambert’s] gayness without naming it’ (Draper 2012: 207). The effect of this enacted on the show a version of media theorist Lynne Joyrich’s (2001) concept of ‘epistemology of the console’ that she asserts ‘teas[es] viewers with an elaborate game of catch-the-queer’ (457). Only after the finale did Idol producer Simon Fuller take up the glam narrative directly, commenting about Lambert: ‘He’s like Marc Bolan meets Bowie, with a touch of Freddie Mercury and the sexiness of Prince’ (Grigoriadis 2009: 52). Complicating this narrative, however, is that glam and actual or lived, homosexuality had very little to do with each other, particularly in the United States where ‘American glam artists and their supporters, apparently experiencing a measure of homosexual panic, were at pains to insist that any tendency to dress lavishly and use makeup should not be taken as signs of sexual abnormality’ (Auslander 2006b: 48–49). Glam was pioneered in the early 1970s by Marc Bolan and David Bowie in England, where, due in part to a long history of ‘[c]ross-dressing … in British popular entertainment’ (Bayles 1994: 255) it became a veritable movement. In the United States, however, the ‘coterie’ of glam rock functioned in a post-Woodstock environment as an antidote to the self-absorption of psychedelic rock musicians who turned their backs to the audience when performing extended electric guitar solos, and the increasingly irrelevant hippie counterculture with which they were associated. While 1960s rock was overdetermined as heterosexual and sexist, the androgyny for which male hippies were known extended only as far as clothing and hairstyle. By comparison, the feminized personae and theatricality of (mostly) heterosexual glam rock musicians rendered them sexually attractive to straight women and gay men, mobilizing the same sexual pleasures cultural theorist Susan Fast (1999) detects in straight fans, men and women, of metal and hard rock bands. Despite conforming to the conventions and ideology of heterosexual rock, the outrageous milieu of glam rock styled it in ways that ‘“played homosexual” to its assertively hetero predecessor’ (Auslander 2006b: 66), thus containing homosexuality. By contrast, disco which emerged later in the 1970s from black rhythm and blues and funk music (Echols 2010), as opposed to glam, constituted an expression of gender and sexuality that actually did challenge

114

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

psychedelic rock’s normative white heterosexuality (Frank 2007), and by implication, the faux homosexuality of glam. Devolving into aggressively hypermasculine heterosexual hair metal punk rock (Bayles 1994) that overtly and pejoratively constituted disco as homosexual, demonstrated in the slogan, ‘Disco Sucks’ (Kooijman 2005), glam, in the form of the ‘glitter and gloss’ of the so-called ‘Disco Decade’ (Vare 1979) finally became queer in the spectacle Adam Lambert.

The spectacle Adam Lambert The format of American Idol requires contestants to sing two-minute covers of songs in a variety of styles in a type of ‘onstage training course in canonic literature in order to understand their place in music history’ (Meizel 2011: 62) as the show conceives it.2 Success depends on how well they make the song ‘their own’ without copying too closely or deviating too far from the original. Not surprisingly, contestants typically use vocal improvisation or ‘melismatic melodic variation  …  as ornamentation’ (63) to distinguish their covers. Signaling virtuosity outside textuality, melisma, like men singing in falsetto, is associated in the United States with African-American singing practices, rendering both ‘a vocal, and thus embodied, symbol of blackness’ (63) in which American popular music history is made audible not only as ‘a performance of racialization’ but of genderization and sexualization, as well; and thus, ‘a re-enactment of the tensions woven throughout the  fabric of American culture’ (64). In this way covering may  be thought of as always already queer; a type of drag act with a twist in that it is ‘a way  of inhabiting another persona or body or voice, … while self-consciously registering the  performance’ (Halberstam 2007: 52).  Whether  tribute, theft or something in between, covers are a means to performatively re-read songs as cultural texts, and the tensions inhered in them provide the impetus of Lambert’s transversal deterritorializing and  reterritorializing  across three relays: first, rock hegemonic masculinities;  second, societal and cultural  heteronormativity/ faux homosexuality of glam; and third, queer  eroticism/desire/ subjectivity in  and as music. Beginning with  ‘Satisfaction’, the song that catapulted  Lambert into the American Idol  finals, I analyze only subsequent  songs that he selected to perform,  omitting songs that were selected for him (see Figure 5.2).

The first recording of a song is the ‘original version’, while the ‘standard version’ is the recording with which the song is associated. I suggest the term ‘popular version’ for famous covers recorded by musicians and enjoyed by audiences who are at least one generation removed from standard versions. 2

QUEER TRANSVERSAL: THE SPECTACLE ADAM L AMBERT

Relays

Rock Masculinity

‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ (1965) Rolling Stones Week 1 Billboard Hot 100

115

Heteronormativity/ Faux Homosexuality

Queer Eroticism/ Desire/Subjectivity

‘Black or White’ (1991) Michael Jackson Week 2 Michael Jackson

‘Ring of Fire’ (2006) Dilana Robichaux Week 3 Grand Ole Opry

FIGURE 5.2  Transversal Relays.

Across transversal relays Lambert’s cover of the Rolling Stones’ iconic ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’, arguably the definitive song exemplifying rock’s cultural rebellion, delineates the musical territory of 1960s rock with gendered aspects of its ideology that conflate with homophobia: ‘machismo, male chauvinism, and outright sexism’ (Greene 2014: 11),3 even as the transversal ‘open[s the song] onto a future’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 311) in terms of the third aspect of Deleuze’s (musical) refrain, leaving behind ‘for somewhere else entirely’ (312) the territorialized assemblages of exaggerated masculinity, masculine sexual prowess and male privilege. This hegemonic rock masculinity is expressed musically with distinctive melodic hooks, driving rhythmic backbeat and gritty singing style characterized by screaming about and with unrestrained emotion: ‘melody, backbeat and raw emotion – i.e., all the things that ever made rock worthwhile’ (Marsh 1979: para1).4 As its most ‘potent’ aural and visual signifier, the electric guitar is prominently featured in rock song introductions and instrumental breaks structured around an obligatory solo. Indeed, opening guitar riffs are so strongly associated with individual rock songs that they function as an aural meme, standing in for the song itself.

Other ‘tenets’ of rock ideology include ‘a genuine respect for rock’s roots music, … a rejection of pretentious “artiness”, and a humanist celebration of individual rebellion and social protest’ (Greene 2014: 76). 4 Mindful of Fast’s (1999) and musicologist Robert Walser’s (1993) concerns about essentialism and reductionism in stereotypes, I assert my lesbian reading in relation to Fast’s acknowledgment that ‘different readings may well stem from … different gendered positions with respect to the music’ (290). 3

116

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

After one hurried statement of the instantly recognizable guitar riff of ‘Satisfaction’, finished off with a splashy cymbal crash, Lambert sings the opening line of the chorus slowly and freely, punctuated by guitar playing the riff de-composed and demented, sounding more country than rock as it outlines out of time the riff’s melodic contour. He wrings every sexual innuendo he can out of the title lyric, looking slyly sidewise at the camera, smiling. Having thus delayed the expected up-temp rock backbeat, Lambert releases it with his declaration, ‘But I try!’ at a much faster tempo than the original, producing an effect of fun that upends rock’s seriousness. He easily moves his body back and forth to the beat, grinning as he throws his head back, sliding his tongue provocatively over his lips during two short guitar riff interludes preceded by the lament, ‘I can’t get no’. Singing the first verse and chorus, Lambert destabilizes the backbeat with syncopation, delaying words and improvising on the melody. At one point, he levels the rhythmic stresses of the title lyric by singing them evenly, on the offbeat as he struts to the downbeat; no backbeat here. Fully occupying the stage, he moves so quickly the camera is barely able to keep up. Frenzied by the end, Lambert exclaims, ‘And I try, and I try, try, try, try, try. I can’t get no!’ But his declaration is not Stones lead singer Mick Jagger’s complaint that he lacks heterosexual sex; rather Lambert’s affirmative transversal performs as invitation, his ecstatic queer desire productive, in the Deleuzian sense, proliferating queer sex. The strength of this queer-ed rock performance advances Lambert into the finals, which begins two weeks later during which his transversal activates the relay deterritorializing heteronormativity assumed and performed in rock, and expressed in glam as faux homosexuality.5 With Michael Jackson’s ‘Black or White’, Lambert invokes racial tensions inhered in American popular music, resonating and resignifying them as queer.6 Where Jackson’s popular and controversial hit references lynching, Lambert’s cover references Matthew Shepard’s beating-death, tied to a fence in Wyoming.7 Similarly, Jackson’s uncompromising refusal

During the weeks preceding the finals, pictures appeared online that purportedly depicted Lambert kissing a man, which the show ignored on- and off-air. The pictures prompted intense widespread media speculation that Lambert was gay, an assertion he neither confirmed nor denied during the season, even as it was widely assumed. He addressed the possibility with humor and a smile, remarking, ‘I know who I am’ (Harris 2009: 2), ‘reject[ing] the dominant logic of the gay/straight binary that insists one must be either gay or straight’ (Draper 2012: 204). 6 Acknowledging after the competition that the pictures did depict him and his ‘ex-boyfriend’ kissing, Lambert explains, ‘I thought the lyrics [of Black or White] fit the situation. They also related to the change the country was going through with Obama’ (Grigoriadis 2009: 55). 7 Investigative journalist Stephen Jimenez (2013) controversially argues that Shepard’s 1998 murder was motivated by drugs and money rather than, or at least much more than, homophobia. Regardless, during the Idol competition and currently, Shepard’s name and murder remain indexical of homophobia in the American cultural imagination. 5

QUEER TRANSVERSAL: THE SPECTACLE ADAM L AMBERT

117

of deadly racial inequality expressed in the song’s bridge is articulated by Lambert as an uncompromising refusal of deadly gay bashing. Introduced with the instantly recognizable upbeat – ‘gay’ according to ‘[l]egendary Guns N Roses guitarist Slash’ (Murray 2010: para1) – guitar riff, Lambert’s cover is a tribute performed in the original key, and includes all verses, pre-choruses, choruses and bridge, where it shifts suddenly from the guitar riff into a powerful rock backbeat. Lambert attacks Jackson’s defiant lyrics with purpose, placing emotional intensity on the last syllable of the line, ‘I ain’t scared of nobody’, holding and connecting it to the next, ‘When the going gets mean’. Expressing this intensity as anger, he fairly yells, ‘kickin’ dirt in my eye’, adding, ‘Yes, you did!’ He later underscores this reference to homophobia by including Jackson’s refrain: ‘If you’re thinking of being my brother’, and then delaying by a full beat, ‘black or white’. This textual silence brackets what immediately precedes it, ‘It don’t matter if you’re’, opening space for what resonates unsung, ‘gay or straight’, as he activates the transversal relay of heteronormativity. Continuing the deterritorializing trajectory of his transversal, Lambert next activates the relay of queer eroticism/desire/subjectivity. He is required to sing a song from Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry: a country song associated with the American rural white South. Self-consciously ignoring Johnny Cash’s original, Lambert covers South African singer Dilana Robichaux’s non-country standard.8 She sings the song in the sultry, if raspy, bottom of her range; electric guitar provides the ‘Kashmir’ sense, arpeggiating the harmonic minor mode’s altered chords. Interacting provocatively with the camera, Roubichax uses her tongue to entice it closer. The beat pushes the song insistently forward as she sings the final chorus ‘straight’, unaltered  and predictable all the way to the release of its slowing outro.  Lambert’s cover, also in harmonic minor, steps outside Western  instrumental timbres by supplementing the house band with sounds of non-Western instruments:  Turkish zil, as well as Indian tabla and  sitar (Meizel 2011). Within this altered aural space, Lambert’s transversal produces his effect of queer eroticism. Singing very softly, almost soto voce, he moves sensuously, circuitously and voluptuously through his upper tenor range and finally into falsetto for the last chorus. Lambert plays with the pitch, singing just below the center, then sliding up and around it, caressing it vocally and aurally. The camera continuously tracks circles and ovals back and forth around him in a single shot. This disorienting, constant movement, zooming in, pulling back, canting, subverts the beat’s forward motion, creating a sense of swirling, as Lambert’s voice envelops and embraces the listener.

His explanation for choosing Roubichaux’s so-called ‘Middle Eastern’ version: ‘Country doesn’t make any sense for me – not my vibe, not my look’ (Grigoriadis 2009: 55). Roubichaux was runner-up on the 2006 reality television show, Rock Star: Supernova. 8

118

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

The effect of queer whole body eroticism (Dyer 2002)9 this produces is intensified when at the end of the chorus, he glissandos effortlessly up from the fifth degree of the scale (F) to the lowered third (D-flat), an unexpected note in that the chord supporting it is not the predictable tonic B-flat minor, but rather the color(full) G-flat minor. Repeating this glissando, Lambert appears to push the still-moving camera away from him as if it is too close, too voyeuristic for the intimate queer eroticism he has created aurally and visually, continuously spinning out the transversal relay of queer eroticism into time and space.

Picking up speed Immediately after this ‘shock wave of affect’, Lambert’s transversal, now in the middle, ‘pick[s] up speed … [in a] a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 25, original emphasis). Its trajectory consists of zigzagging queer desire (Week 4), sweeping away rock masculinity (Week 5), zigzagging queer subjectivity (Week 6), sweeping away rock masculinity (Week 7), zigzagging queer desire (Week 8). Within this transversal, Week 4 connects with 8, Week 5 with 7. Between them, in the middle, Week 6 invokes the conjunction of Deleuze’s rhizome: ‘and … and … and …’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 25) that posits a logic sweeping away rooted foundations based on fixed points of starting and stopping, actualizing instead potentialities of lives worth living (see Figure 5.3). While Lambert’s ‘Tracks of My Tears’ (Week 4) opens ontological potentialities of queer desire, his ‘If I Can’t Have You’ (Week 8) expresses queer desire’s ontological imperative. He performs both songs (the former rhythm and blues, the latter disco) – shockingly – as ballads. His cover of Smokey Robinson and the Miracles’ original is a tribute not only to the recording, but to African-American singing practices and the American 1960s Civil Rights Movement, even as his cover of the Bee Gees’ original is an ‘anti-cover’10 rejecting not disco’s musical style, but the hysterical homophobia it engendered.

Queer theorist Richard Dyer (2002) argues that rock’s eroticism, ‘thrusting, grinding … confines sexuality to cock (and this is why, no matter how progressive the lyrics and even when performed by women, rock remains indelibly phallo-centric music’ (155). By contrast, with its ‘willingness to play with rhythm, delaying it, jumping it, … the range of percussion instruments used and their different effect … [disco] restores eroticism to the whole of the body and for both sexes’ (155–156). 10 ‘Anti-covers are consciously overt deconstructions … of a previous version as far as message as well as music’ (Greene 2014: 8). 9

QUEER TRANSVERSAL: THE SPECTACLE ADAM L AMBERT

Relays

Rock Masculinity

Heteronormativity/ Faux Homosexuality

119

Queer Eroticism/ Desire/Subjectivity

Week Number Theme Week 4 Motown Week 5 Popular iTunes Downloads

‘Tracks of My Tears’ (1965) Smokey Robinson & Miracles ‘Play That Funky Music’ (1976) Wild Cherry

Week 6 Birth Year Week 7 Cinema Songs

‘Mad World’ (2003) Gary Jules ‘Born to Be Wild’ (1968) Steppenwolf

Week 8 Disco

‘If I Can’t Have You’ (1977) Bee Gees

FIGURE 5.3  Middle Transversal.

Sitting on a stool alongside a three-piece acoustic ensemble (guitar, cajón, upright bass) comprised of black musicians, Lambert sings ‘Tracks of My Tears’ almost exclusively in falsetto, which was heard in disco as false, forced and unnatural. So ‘prominent in the soul and soul-influenced disco of the mid-to-late 1970s’, falsetto came to represent all that was purportedly wrong with the genre: ‘Excessive, synthetic, overproduced, ornamental’ (François 1995: 443). As a voice of abject otherness mirroring disco’s otherness, however, falsetto’s immaterial ‘sound is less a pose than an unabashed confession of vulnerability. Falsetto is so sexually powerful precisely because its alien and alienating effect is still heard at the most intimate level; the sense, when one hears it, is of being alone with it and of its not being able to be anywhere else’ (445) – exactly the queer ontological effect Lambert’s performance produces. After singing the first verse and chorus, Lambert moves directly to the third verse that contrasts the singer’s outer appearance with his inner emotional state. Robinson, singing in high tenor voice, performs this verse with the Miracles as call and response, a style of singing also associated with African-American culture. Lambert, singing in a sweet and effortless falsetto, foregrounds the lyrics ‘outside’ and ‘inside’, extending the second syllable of each word, the pitches for both (D to B) outlining the tonic chord, doubly inverted. After the final chorus, Lambert adds a coda, singing an ascending

120

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

melodic sequence, ‘I need you, I need you, I need …’. He extends the last word with a short melisma that never resolves harmonically or lyrically. Injecting uncertainty about what he needs beyond the unspecified you, the incomplete sentence and half cadence speak the silences of queer experience socio-politically, opening ontological space for queer desire. With ‘If I Can’t Have You’ Lambert expresses ontological imperatives of queer desire. Standing this time, and singing resolutely embodied in his high tenor range, his delivery is heart wrenching, more personal, emotional and intimate than at any other time during the competition. He stretches musical time with delicate rubatos and extended melismas, the antithesis of disco diva vocal stereotypes. With disco-associated homophobia palpable, his anguish reads socio-politically in the context of gay bashing (‘no chance for me’, ‘my life would end’, ‘am I strong enough to see it through’). Omitting the second pre-chorus lyric, ‘To dreams that never will come true’, he produces ontological imperatives of queer desire, without which (‘I don’t want nobody’) there is no desire. Lambert’s covers of Wild Cherry’s funk rock song, ‘Play That Funky Music’ (Week 5) and Steppenwolf’s hard driving late 1960s rock anthem, ‘Born to Be Wild’ (Week 7) sweep away rock masculinity to cut diagonally through heteronormativity. They are both performed faster than the original and textually connected to disco’s destruction.11 The original slower tempo of ‘Play That Funky Music’ opened rhythmic space for an exceedingly funky opening guitar riff and highly contrapuntal texture that compelled the body to move. Lambert’s much faster cover, opening with the band playing a less syncopated riff and subsequent rock-infused backbeat is funky enough to only invite the body to move. Nonetheless, in its telling the story of a rock musician who decides to ‘disco down’, to hear and then commit to play ‘that funky music, white boy’, Lambert performs the one song that acknowledges disco’s musical beginnings in black funk, and rhythm and blues (Echols 2010), and alludes to its violent demise articulated in the prescient lyric: ‘till you die’, re-calling the death to disco campaign and calling-out rock’s ideological and commercial complicity. Similarly, Lambert’s much faster cover of Steppenwolf’s rock anthem, ‘Born to Be Wild’, synonymous with hard rock and masculinist biker culture, engages the spectacle Adam Lambert as it musically and culturally de-forms

Caught in a vortex of racism and homophobia, disco’s destruction was literally carried out by 70,000 young, white, middle-class male rock fans during Disco Demolition Night staged in 1979 at Comiskey Park, home of the Chicago White Sox baseball team. Chanting ‘Disco sucks!’ the crowd cheered as a fireworks bomb blew up more than 50,000 disco records, collected and placed in center field for that purpose. 11

QUEER TRANSVERSAL: THE SPECTACLE ADAM L AMBERT

121

and trans-forms the song’s rebellion. Displacing the original’s ponderous seriousness, Lambert’s up-tempo romp not only makes the song amenable to dancing, it fairly insists on it. He skips downstage in tennis shoes to an introduction that features drums rather than electric guitar in a sly reference to disco as the late addition of guitars and over-determined backbeat produce the effect of an exuberant rock performance mocking the original by completely overshadowing it. Lambert’s playful rock persona ironically references glam, juxtaposing guyliner with biker fingerless gloves, ‘taking the world’ in a queer ‘love embrace’. Replacing the lyric ‘never wanna die’ with ‘never gonna die’ references ‘till you die’ of ‘Play That Funky Music’, making the ‘Born to Be Wild’ lyric firing ‘guns’ less phallic than political. The ‘we’ who are born to be wild, no longer hyper-masculine bikers, are queer. And so is rock. Zigzagging, these last four songs are heard across Lambert’s expression of queer subjectivity in his performance of ‘Mad World’ (Week 6), sung between the two disco-implicated rock songs. Choosing it because the 1982 Tears for Fears synthpop original coincided with the year of his birth, Lambert covers the standard ballad version sung by Gary Jules in the 2001 movie Donnie Darko and released as a single in 2003. The spare accompaniment and slow tempo of this version contextualize the singer’s confusion and despair with subtlety. Lambert condenses the song by singing only lyrics that express alienation and isolation that, given the song’s location and function in his traversal, signify contested subjectivities. After each shortened verse he sings the chorus describing his experience of this ‘very, very mad world’, displacing the accent: ‘vér-y, ver-áy’. He begins using melodic improvisation during the second verse and continues through the chorus, culminating with four repetitions of the refrain. Sequencing higher, Lambert moves seamlessly into falsetto for the final iteration of the title lyric. That he must correct the last pitch, initially sharp and out of tune, contributes to the delicacy and vulnerability of this intensely intimate performance. Seated on a chair located at the front of a backlit stage, Lambert appears small and alone, a silhouette singing quietly to himself. The accompaniment begins with solo piano; light percussion and strings are gradually added. He stands on the second iteration of ‘look right through me’, the musical line and emotional weight leading to the word ‘me’. But he is illusory, deindividuated in the Deleuzian sense (impersonal but not depersonalized), his face never completely visible until the song ends and the house lights are brought up. Finally revealed, Lambert resembles a young Paul McCartney, boyish, sweet, anyone’s son. With this astonishing performance the media spectacle ‘Adam Lambert’ disembodied actualizes in the middle, even as the spectacle Adam Lambert (‘the dreams in which I’m dyin’) maps ontological imperatives of queer subjectivity.

122

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

… to ruin representation(s)12 Having expressed queer ontological imperatives, Lambert’s transversal slows through the ‘ruins’ (Olkowski 1999) of representational hierarchies to sweep away molar identities of heteronormativity and rock masculinity (see Figure 5.4). Lambert is required to sing a song made famous by a group of American actors and singers known as ‘the rat pack’ in the 1950s and 1960s, but he eschews ‘rat pack’ member Sammy Davis Jr.’s 1965 version of ‘Feeling Good’.13 Instead, evoking Nina Simone’s 1965 standard version,14 he covers the ‘popular’ and arguably glam version recorded in 2001 by the English progressive hard rock band, Muse. Famous for spectacular live performances, Muse’s version is mechanistic (Matthew Bellamy sings the second verse through a megaphone) and densely scored, as it attempts to represent Relays

Rock Masculinity

Heteronormativity/ Faux Homosexuality

Queer Eroticism/ Desire/Subjectivity

Week Number Theme Week 9 Rat Pack Standards Week 10 Rock Music

‘Feeling Good’ (2001) Muse (1965) Nina Simone ‘Whole Lotta Love’ (1969) Led Zeppelin

Week 11 Contestant Choice Week 12 Season Reprise

‘Cryin’ (1993) Aerosmith ‘Mad World’ (2009) Adam Lambert

FIGURE 5.4  Queer Transversal.

The infinitive, ‘to ruin’ invokes Deleuze’s event, ‘never what is happening in the present, but eternally that which has just happened and that which is about to happen’ (Boundas 1994: 105). 13 Featured in the allegorical English musical, The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd, written by Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley in 1964, ‘Feeling Good’ is sung by the character, ‘The Negro’. 14 Simone’s deeply felt ‘Feeling Good’ expresses profound hope related to potentialities of racial equality in the United States. 12

QUEER TRANSVERSAL: THE SPECTACLE ADAM L AMBERT

123

a hopeful vision of the future where people can begin a new life (http:// www.musewiki.org, accessed 7  November  2014). Apparently cognizant of the American Civil Rights context during which Simone recorded her standard version, Muse’s naïve futuristic interpretation signifies the faux homosexuality of glam, swept away in Lambert’s Idol performance dragging heterosexuality. Although Lambert’s accompaniment mimics Muse’s keyboard playing repeated triplet chords, big band style shift into the second verse, ­heavy‑handed mishandling of the chord progression after the third verse, his vocal style covers and re-calls Simone’s powerful and intensely personal standard. Wearing a white satin suit and tie over a black shirt that invoke 1940s and 1950s gangster imagery exuding heterosexuality, he walks down a long flight of stairs, stops about halfway and sings the first verse lightly in his upper range, moving easily in and out of falsetto. His voice cracks slightly on the words, ‘for me’ as the accompaniment stops. Lambert continues a cappella, slowing and extending the word ‘feeling’. Taking an exaggerated breath, he finishes the refrain, ‘good’, in full voice, kicking off the exaggerated big band sound. Lambert’s pseudo-heterosexual swagger down the last of the stairs lurches awkwardly as he moves with the pickup instead of on the beat. Arriving at center stage, he stands and sings the last verse invoking freedom, emphasizing, ‘You know how I feel’, speaking to his community, potentialities of Guattari’s concept of transversality (Raunig 2002) invoking a people to come. Culturally queer and intrinsically theatrical, drag produces the effect of heterosexual gender. Because ‘there is no original or primary gender that drag imitates … heterosexuality is always in the process of imitating and approximating its own phantasmatic idealization of itself – and failing’ (Butler 1991: 21, original emphasis). Lambert’s dragging heterosexuality exposes the precariousness of its infinitely repeating imitative structure. Requiring an audience, drag only drags when the audience knows the performer is other than what his or her drag produces. With Lambert’s drag revealed through his awkwardness and sensitivity with which he sings the opening lyric, he ends his tortured cover (the only one all season consigning him to the bottom three), singing a series of ascending sequences on the word, ‘feeling’. Holding a high D nearly ten seconds, during which the camera again moves all the way around him in one continuous shot, Lambert’s queer melisma descends precisely, D-C-D-CBb-A-D. Time stops, he finishes the lyric quietly, the band vamps lightly, reiterated heteronormativity, swept away in his now cascading queer transversal, fails. Lambert’s cover of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’, performed the next week, does not sweep away heteronormativity so much as rock masculinity, pushing the latter beyond its limits. The distinctive opening guitar riff, a short (eight-beat), endlessly repeating ostinato that keeps ‘the body … in a

124

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

fairly constant state of … arousal’ (Fast 1999: 289) is intensified by doubling the guitars, as both play steady sixteenth notes from beat one through the downbeat of three; and by adding percussion on every downbeat. Performed rigidly in time at the same tempo as the original, Lambert’s cover sounds faster due in part to the percussive effect of the guitars’ sixteenth notes. Electric bass is added in both versions for the guitar riff’s second iteration. This thicker, heavier, busier texture confronts the listener with a wall of sound that is so dense it manages to obscure the descending guitar slide heard prominently in the chorus of the original version. By comparison, Zeppelin’s is contrapuntal, even experimental in its long free-form instrumental break, giving it a subtlety that Lambert’s cover, driven by over-determined backbeat and frenzied percussion, rejects. Bludgeoning listeners, albeit in a fun way, from the beginning, Lambert’s cover drives its intensity right up to the stoptime setting up the inevitable guitar solo. Assuming the house band’s impersonalized aggression, Lambert puts on for the only time all season an overtly exaggerated aggressive rock attitude that distorts his enunciation through Elvis-like sneers. Where Robert Plant’s singing sounds vulnerable or even feminine, if not exactly intimate, Lambert’s powerful, intense vocal style produces a dark, monolithic, menacing effect. He attacks the famous a cappella solo by first picking up the microphone and swaggering downstage, where he ‘plants’ it. Each phrase is followed by silence as he sneers, surveying the Deleuzian territory where music (‘rhythm and melody’) becomes expressive (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 317). On the cut-off of ‘womaaaan’ – the only genderspecific word he sings during the entire competition – Lambert tosses his head back defiantly, while a faint reverb decays. After ‘Zshoo need-uh’, he stomps the band’s minor inverted (I–IV) ‘amen’ cadence, and belts ‘love’ on a long melisma. The band rocks out, ending with one final iteration of the guitar riff, one last gasp of hegemonic rock masculinity. Only then, after his spectacular performance stops, does Lambert’s spectacle of affective-performative moving force actualize and materialize. Wearing earrings and guyliner, his hair hangs lightly along the side of his face, which looks soft and feminine, foundation covering every line and any hint of beard. His silver leather jacket reads lamé in the context of multiple necklaces cascading over his cleavage revealed by the plunging neckline of what now reads as black lace lingerie. Lambert presents here not so much glam as trans, and with this image of trans-queer masculinity, the queer ‘Voice of God’ amen has the last word, finally, not just sweeping away, but also foreclosing rock masculinity. Performed just before the final week, Lambert’s cover of Aerosmith’s ‘Cryin’, sweeping away heteronormativity one last time, has a certain feeling of inevitability. Having already covered Freddie Mercury in his initial

QUEER TRANSVERSAL: THE SPECTACLE ADAM L AMBERT

125

audition, Mick Jagger in the semi-finals, and Robert Plant in the finals, glammy Steven Tyler could not be missed. Moreover, at this point in the competition, Lambert’s victory appears assured, as the media frenzy around him reaches a fever pitch. His rock get-up for ‘Cryin’ is perfunctory: leather jacket with sleeves extending below the wrists, jeans with chain and large military-style boots. Under the jacket he wears a mostly obscured black Metallica t-shirt glittering with what appear to be rhinestones. A down-tempo power ballad, ‘Cryin’ opens with a moody triplet-based guitar riff, followed by a lightly moving verse ballad accompanied by solo guitar outlining steady eighth-note triplets. The song’s power sections are driven by hard rock backbeat, made heavier by a pounding eighth note triplet pickup. Lambert’s cover rolls through all of these sections, notably the power-heavy bridge and its lyric reference to pleasure and pain of heterosexual sex. The triplet in his version, however, fades into the texture, effaced by added brass and busy guitar solo, as he screams the words, ‘making love’. Rousing himself to move across the stage only during the over-wrought bridge, made all the more so in comparison to his abortive two-line ballad, Lambert, just this once, does not sing as the character of the song. This is not him; he is not the ‘I’ of the lyric. The psychic and actual distance he creates from heterosexual sex as pain sweeping away heteronormativity produces it as meaning-less, signifying nothing. With this performance, the competition portion of the season ends, and Deleuze’s transverse way opens on a future, this time, of queer potentialities actualizing in and as disparate ways of living. Lambert sings ‘Mad World’ in the finale not as a reprise of his Week 6 performance, but rather as a cover of it. Performed at a slightly slower tempo, the accompaniment adds a few subtle percussion effects; his singing restrained, safe, produces a flat emotional affect. What his first performance revealed, this one conceals; where the former reached out, this one holds back. The familiar media spectacle ‘Adam Lambert’ is gone, replaced by a strange outsider, cloaked in long leather coat, military-style boots, fingerless gloves, guyliner, dark earrings. Emerging from a swirl of smoke, the stage backlit from directly behind, instead of from above where it was located Week 6, his black silhouette is outlined in moonlike light. Lambert’s face appears from shadow as he smoothly descends a staircase. With the queer spectacle Adam Lambert actually visible, its deterritorializing transversal reterritorializes. He sings carefully and accurately; finishes his last ascending melodic sequence too soon, on the tonic A, instead of the D above, where he dangled previously, that pitch now too high, too precarious; his queer subjectivity a virtual musical life worth living, real but not actual.

126

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

References Internet sources Harris, M. (2009), ‘Adam Lambert: Shaking up Idol’, EW.Com Entertainment Weekly, 8 May. Available online: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20277643,00 .html (accessed 18 November 2013). Marsh, D. (1979), ‘Duty Now for the Future’, Rolling Stone, archives, 29 September. Available online: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews /duty-now-for-the-future-19790920 (accessed 1 November 2014). Murray, R. (2010), ‘Slash on Michael Jackson track’, Clash, news, 3 December. Available online: http://www.clashmusic.com/news/slash-on-michael-jackson -track (accessed 7 November 2014). MuseWiki. (2014), ‘Feeling Good’, Blog, last modified 20 April. Available online: http://www.musewiki.org/Feeling_Good_(song)#cite_note-4 (accessed 7 November 2014). Raunig, G. (2002), ‘Transversal Multitudes’, trans. A. Derieg, European Institute for Progressive Policies, September. Available online: http://eipcp.net /transversal/0303/raunig/en (accessed 21 July 2014). Vare, R. (1979), ‘Discophobia’, The New York Times, A15, 10 July. Available online: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9501E3DA1738E432A2 5753C1A9619C946890D6CF (accessed 8 November 2014).

Literature Auslander, P. (2004), ‘Performance Analysis and Popular Music: A Manifesto’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 14 (1): 1–13. Auslander, P. (2006a), ‘Musical Personae’, The Drama Review, 50 (1): 100–119. Auslander, P. (2006b), Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press. Bayles, M. (1994), Hole in Our Soul: The Loss of Beauty and Meaning in American Popular Music, New York: The Free Press. Bogue, R. (2007), Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics, Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Boundas, Constantin V. (1994), ‘Deleuze: Serialization and Subject-Formation’, in C. V. Boundas and D. Olkowski (eds), Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, 99–116, New York and London: Routledge. Bricusse, L. and A. Newley (1964), The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd. London, UK: Essex Music Group. Licensing rights owned by TamsWitmark Music Library, Inc. Buchanan, I. (2004), ‘Introduction: Deleuze and Music’, in I. Buchanan and M. Swiboda (eds), Deleuze and Music, 1–19, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Butler, J. (1991), ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’, in D. Fuss (ed.), Inside/ out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories, 13–31, New York and London: Routledge.

QUEER TRANSVERSAL: THE SPECTACLE ADAM L AMBERT

127

Butler, J. (1993), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York and London: Routledge. Conley, V. A. (2009), ‘Thirty-Six Thousand Forms of Love: The Queering of Deleuze and Guattari’, in C. Nigianni and M. Storr (eds), Deleuze and Queer Theory, 24–36, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. del Rio, E. (2008), Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance: Powers of Affection, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (2003), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. D. W. Smith, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (2004), ‘Preface to Hocquenghem’s L’Après-Mai des faunes’, trans. M. Taormina, in D. Lapoujade (ed.), Desert Islands and Other Texts: 1953–1974, 284–288, Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e). Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. DeNora, T. (2000), Music in Everyday Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DeNora, T. (2003), ‘Music Sociology: Getting the Music into the Action’, British Journal of Music Education, 20 (2): 165–177. Draper, J. (2012), ‘Idol Speculation: Queer Identity and a Media-Imposed Lens of Detection’, Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture, 11: 201–216. Dyer, R. (2002), Only Entertainment, 2nd edn, London and New York: Routledge. Echols, A. (2010), Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company. Fast, S. (1999), ‘Rethinking Issues of Gender and Sexuality in Led Zeppelin: A Woman’s View of Pleasure and Power in Hard Rock’, American Music, 17 (3): 245–299. François, A.-L. (1995), ‘Fakin’ It/Makin’ It: Falsetto’s Bid for Transcendence in 1970s Disco’, Perspectives of New Music, 33 (1/2): 442–457. Frank, G. (2007), ‘Discophobia: Antigay Prejudice and the 1979 Backlash against Disco’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 16 (2): 276–306. Frith, S. (1996), Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Galliford, M. (2010), ‘Touring “Country,” Sharing “Home”: Aboriginal Tourism, Australian Tourists and the Possibilities for Cultural Transversality’, Tourist Studies, 10 (3): 227–244. Greene, D. (2014), The Rock Cover Song: Culture, History, Politics, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Grigoriadis, V. (2009), ‘Wild Idol’, Rolling Stone, RS1081: 50–57. Grosz, E. (2008), Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, New York: Columbia University Press. Halberstam, J. (2007), ‘Theorizing Gender, Culture, and Music: Keeping Time with Lesbians on Ecstasy’, Women & Music, 11: 51–58. Jimenez, Shephen (2013), The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew Shepard, Hanover, NH: Steerforth Press.

128

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Joyrich, L. (2001), ‘Epistemology of the Console’, Critical Inquiry, 27 (3): 439–467. Kooijman, J. (2005), ‘Turn the Beat around: Richard Dyer’s “In Defense of Disco” Revisited’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, 8 (2): 257–266. Massumi, B. (1992), A User’s Guide to ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, Cambridge: MIT Press. May, T. (2003), ‘When Is a Deleuzian Becoming?’, Continental Philosophy, 36: 139–153. May, T. (2005), Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Meizel, K. (2011), Idolized: Music, Media, and Identity in ‘American Idol’, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Olkowski, D. (1999), Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation, Berkeley: University of California Press. Small, C. (1998), Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, Hanover, NH: University of New England Press. Walser, R. (1993), Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press.

6 ‘A People to Come’ in Himalayan Village Music – A Deleuzian-Guattarian Study of Musical Performance Pirkko Moisala

For an ethnomusicologist, who is accustomed to approaching any kind of music in and as culture (Merriam 1964), as performance (Herndon and McLeod 1981), as well as studying ‘people making music’ (Titon 1997) all over the world, reading Deleuze and Guattari can be a confusing experience. Their approach to music seems to be guided to a great extent by the conventions of the Romantic and Modernist periods of the Western art music tradition. Their characterization of ‘primitive societies’ (1987: 175–176) also reflects an ethnocentrism foreign to current ethnomusicology.1 However, what resonates positively with the ethnomusicological ‘to music’ as a sociocultural process (musicking by Small 1998) is their emphasis on becoming instead of being, their request that the scholar approach processes in between, as well as their insistence on the constitutive relationality of existence. The Deleuzian-Guattarian analysis of the development of Western European art music in relation to certain modes of social organization and interaction (1987: 292–300; Bogue 2003: 35–53) also corresponds well with ethnomusicology’s basic view of music as social practice. The eurocentrism of Deleuzian thought has been addressed by Gyatri Chakravorty Spivak in her essay of postcolonial criticism, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988). 1

130

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

In this chapter, I will explore what can be gained by combining DeleuzianGuattarian approaches and concepts with an ethnomusicological and ethnographic study on musical performances.2 Ethnographic work that aims to ‘understand people in a different kind of temporality – in between, in flux and [in] transition – as they endure and try to escape constraints and articulate new systems of perception and action’ (Biehl and Locke 2010: 320) provides an effective basis for a Deleuzian-Guattarian approach to musical performances as events that open up into the future. In What Is Philosophy? (1994) Deleuze and Guattari state that the arts, the sciences and philosophy share the common task of fashioning and creating ‘a people to come’ (206 and 218). To do so, artists engage in what Deleuze calls fabulation – an activation of the ‘powers of the false’ that dissolves conventional social categories and codes and invents new possibilities for life (Bogue 2007: 14). In Deleuze’s (1997: 4) words, a people to come ‘is not exactly a people called upon to dominate the world. It is a minor people, eternally minor, taken up in a becomingrevolutionary’. Thus, ‘a people to come’ is not about an already existing people but becoming-people. Unlike the Deleuzian-Guattarian theorization of ‘a people to come’ that takes art as art works, ‘fabulated’ and created by artists, I argue that also musical performances – particularly their embodiments, rituality and affects – may create new ways of performing, feeling and being social, and this may, therewith, also give rise to ‘a people to come’. The ethnographic material for the discussion is collected from a Nepalese village over a forty-year research period, most recently in November 2013 and April–May  2016. In this chapter, I will particularly focus on the musical performance of village women. Ethnographic methodology provides a fruitful means to study the immanent fields of people’s everyday lives. Instead of promoting a theoretical view ‘from above’ applied to the subject of study, the ethnographic tradition favors a culture-sensitive and actor-oriented view. Deleuzian-Guattarian philosophy, however, cannot be regarded as a rigid theory because it exemplifies the ever-changing nature of existence including thought and concepts. Instead of imposing anything from the outside to the subject matter to be studied, it merely provides a perspective of interpretation. Through its emphasis on immanence and becoming, a Deleuzian-Guattarian approach makes space for examining what is becoming within the understanding of what is. As cultural theorist, Claire Colebrook (2002: 126) writes, ‘in a world of becoming what something “is” is always open to what it is not yet’. Milla Tiainen (2012) has developed and used a Deleuzian ethnographic, ‘rhizomusicological’ approach to study the immanence and relationality of opera rehearsals. Unlike hers, my study emphasizes music as a communal activity in ways that build upon ethnomusicological study of musical performance. 2

‘A PEOPLE TO COME’ IN HIMAL AYAN VILL AGE MUSIC

131

Musical performances as events In ethnomusicological literature, musical performances are often noted as constructions, performances and enforcements of ethnic, racial and national identities (among others, Stoke 1994; Askew 2002; Shelemay  2009), emphasizing the use of music in the creation of social cohesion as well as for political purposes. In its basic form, the ethnography of musical performance describes what is performed, by whom, how, when, where and why (Seeger 1980; Middleton 2012: 10) in order to interpret the ways in which musical performances represent or perform culture (Kiuslik 2001). However, musical performances can also do more than just bring about these unifications. If approached as an assemblage (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 406; Deleuze and Parnet 1987: 69), a musical performance can be examined as an entanglement of a multiplicity of heterogeneous elements and relations between them. The assemblage of musical performance involves relations established by encounters between a variety of components that are affected by their interconnectedness, such as soundwaves and other materialities; instruments and other paraphernalia of the performance event; and musicking human bodies, technologies, social codes, values and discourses. Thus, an assemblage ‘acts on semiotic flows, material flows, and social flows simultaneously’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 25). The performance as an assemblage is machinic; thus, it becomes in constantly changing constellations and entanglements (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 7–8). Even though from the outset the performances may repeat an already known pattern, the songs that are sung may be well known and the dancers perform familiar dance movements, each performance unfolds in novel constellations. In every assemblage, there is both the present organization of its bodies and actualized expressions and its virtuality expressing its potential. According to philosopher Paul Patton’s (2006: 35) interpretation, the virtual machines of mutation and deterritorialization – processes that decode the more or less segmented elements of life – form the most profound inner nature of an assemblage. Thus, as an assemblage, a musical performance is not only about what it is – who performs and to whom, what, where, how and why – but it is also defined by its unfolding potential: by what it does and might be capable of. In this respect, a musical performance is not only about making sounds and movements but it participates in the immanence of the constant becoming of life. In that capacity and if using Deleuzian terminology, a musical performance should rather be called a musical event, because: [a]n event is not simply something that happens … but the capacity to open up the future and make things happen. In other words, the event is defined as an event by virtue of its capacity to change, to make a

132

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

difference . … [B]y opening up the future, the event takes its differential nature beyond the moment of its own realization, promising further differentiation. The event is therefore a matter of continuity as well as discontinuity. (Thanem and Lindstead 2006: 51, original emphasis) As events, musical performances are not fixed entities with clear beginnings and ends. They are ‘rather inside what occurs’ (Deleuze 1990: 147) that evolve as and in relations and produce becoming. They are ‘not another moment within time, but something that allows time to take off on a new path’ (Colebrook 2002: 57). In the following, I will approach musical performances of Āma Samuha (Mothers’ Society) of Tamu village women as an event in the DeleuzianGuattarian sense, asking what it is that this performance does, what is inside of what occurs, and how these involve becoming. I will first provide a brief ethnography of Tamu village society and music, after which I will focus on the musical performances and their transformative effects on the village gender order and the gender category of ‘a Tamu woman’. Before concluding, I will discuss some aspects of the musical events – embodiments, rituality and affective work – that add to their transformative power.

Musicking the milieu In 2013, almost twenty years had passed since my last visit to Klinu, a village in the Lamjung district of mid-Nepal. Most of the villagers identify themselves as Tamus (in Nepali, Gurung),3 but there are also people from other castes and ethnicities. The villagers struggle to come to terms with their demanding material conditions; in addition to receiving financial support from former villagers working abroad in India, North Korea and Arabic countries, village life is based on small-scale farming. At the outset, the village looked very much the same as during my previous visit with the exception of tin roofs that had replaced stone and thatched ones. Unlike before when one had to walk for days in order to reach the village, it was now accessible by bus. In addition, a few houses had small solar panels on their roofs; some men and youths had mobile phones; each house had an outhouse and many of them had a supply of running water from a pipe in the yard. The recent material improvements within the relative poverty of the village combined with the unstable political situation of Nepal4 prompted

As an identity category, the Tamu refers to an indigenous ethnic group also known as the Gurung. Before the Hinduistic social order of Nepal was abandoned in 2008, ethnic groups such as the Gurung were regarded as castes within the Hindu caste hierarchy. 4 Since the People’s revolution in the 1990s, Nepal was without a constitution law until autumn 2015. 3

‘A PEOPLE TO COME’ IN HIMAL AYAN VILL AGE MUSIC

133

the villagers to actively speak about the future: how to sustain and improve village life; how the wider ongoing political and economic changes might affect it; and how to keep village life and culture alive when youths leave for cities in search of a better future. The head of the village, Ram Chandra Gurung, emphasized the need to unite villagers to work together, obtain electricity and develop tourism. This discursive emphasis on what-will-be and what-should-be-done encouraged me to study what it is that musical performances may do to influence this situation, how they can partake in molding the future and what kind of future that might be. Despite the infrastructural improvements, the everyday village soundscape was much as before, filled with people’s shouts, the sounds of cockerels and chickens, goats, dogs and water buffaloes as well as bird song. An airplane flying over once a day was the only engine-based sound to be heard. The same public music and dance performances were still arranged as during my previous research visits (Moisala 1991). Village men mainly from the lower sora jāt castes5 organized epic Ghātu dance dramas, and the youth Thetār dance performances to popular tunes. These performances were given for visitors and special occasions, such as weddings and the first rice-feeding of a male child. However, there were also a couple of changes in the village soundscape. Teenagers’ drumming and singing no longer echoed in the evenings because parents wanted their children to concentrate on school work. In addition, recently, women – who previously had only been the caterers for men’s musical performances – had started to give their own performances. The daily sounds and frequently arranged performances can be regarded in Deleuzian terms as rhythms that create the village milieu, ‘a block of spacetime constituted by the periodic repetition of the components’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 345).6 They provide the village with consistency and encode the milieu. In addition to the rites after death, musical performances are the only events that bring the villagers together collectively. In a Deleuzian-Guattarian spirit, it can be stated that musical performances thus create refrains, that is, sets of relations (see Bogue 2003: 74) that constitute the Tamu village territory by enacting and confirming basic Tamu values, and their emphasis on community and reciprocity.

The Tamu society has an internal social hierarchy, according to which Tamus are divided into lower sora jāt (consisting of sixteen clans) and higher char jāt (four clans). 6 In his introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi states that the concept of milieu combines the three dimensions that it has in the French language: surroundings, medium and middle (1987: xvii). When approaching a village as a milieu, I interpret surroundings in its geographical and cultural locations, as well as its nature and land. As a medium, the village involves ecological and sociocultural systems. The middle refers to the village’s virtuality and emergence. 5

134

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

The Tamu culture’s emphasis on community also manifests itself in the Tamu conceptualization of music, gīt gāune bajāune, which only exists when sounds are played and sung by a group to an audience. The audience, however, does not need to consist of human beings. It can also be nonhuman and comprise deities, ancestral spirits, spirits of a mountain, tree or stone. With regard to human, non-human, natural and spiritual elements, Tamu cosmology is holistic, connective and relational (Strickland 1982; Mumford 1990).7 In addition to humans and demons, deities such as local ‘earth owners’ occupy the universe and elements of nature are respected as active participants in the flow of existence.8 The natural environment is also conducive to the shaping of musical expression and aesthetics.9 The performance is aesthetically pleasing when it ‘flows like a mountain stream’, sallalā pānī page jastāi, and some of the dance postures mimic human encounters with the mountain slopes; the slowly twisting movements of the body as well as the position of the trunk and heads of the dancers are similar to those that one has to take on the steep paths when carrying a heavy basket placed on the back and supported on the forehead by a carrying rope. Musicking is an integral part of the village milieu. In addition to decoding the social system, it is harnessed for the economic sustainability of the community. The villagers never arrange musical events only for pure entertainment. The person, to whom the performance is addressed, must pay for the music according to his capability. The money collected is used toward the needs of the village. In this way, music-making is part of reciprocal exchanges of the village community. All in all, including its musical activities, a Tamu village community is well structured. The sense of community is intense among villagers, who can only rely on each other for survival. Despite the emphasis on togetherness, the village community can also be seen as a multiplicity of a generalized body, which consists of a variety of lifestyles, socio-economic positions, experiences and narrations. As a milieu, the village is a nomadic space, which, if approached from a Deleuze and Guattari-inspired perspective, is affected by three kinds of simultaneous flows: molar lines that code, rigidify and block, which thus form and support the segmentarity of the social system; the immanent field of molecular lines that break down and reveal the multiplicity of the system; as well as lines of flight that decode and bring about new opening within the social (Albertsen and Diken 2006: 235–236). For instance, the traditional caste-based and contemporary administrative The religious activities of Tamu villagers include features of Buddhism, Hinduism, as well as animism and shamanism that closely relate to the Tibetan pre-Buddhist Bonpo tradition. 8 Deleuzian-Guattarian philosophy has interesting similarities with this kind of indigenous world view that stresses the relationality of existence. 9 Ethnomusicologists have documented many similar nature–culture events. Steven Feld’s (1990) study on Kaluli sound ecology is a widely recognized classic. 7

‘A PEOPLE TO COME’ IN HIMAL AYAN VILL AGE MUSIC

135

systems of the village can be regarded as core components of its social molarity whereas social and economic differences among the villagers are elements of its molecular multiplicity. Finally, new unexpected openings are also possible in the milieu’s space-time. However segmented the community seems to be, it always includes potential for change and openness to processes of becoming different. In the following, I will focus on the gender category of a Tamu woman in order to demonstrate the capacity of Āma Samuha performance events to produce change.

Āma Samuha events On my fourth day in Klinu in 2013, the women asked if the Āma Samuha could give me a performance. I accepted the invitation with delight, particularly because it was a women’s enterprise. Twenty years ago, it was against social norms for married women to perform music in public. Even if a female child and teenager had been an active musician in the evening gatherings of youth called Rodī,10 upon getting married, she stopped dancing, singing and playing drums. The singing voice of a mature woman was considered ugly. If married women tried to join in with singing adult males, they were laughed out of the situation.11 These norms and acts arose from the traditional Tamu gender order that privileged men. For instance, thá wawa, the ‘casting out the evil’ chanting of Tamu shamans, which narrates the proper and improper order of things, states how ‘Husband preceding Wife is proper, Wife preceding Husband is improper’ (see Strickland 1982: 81). Thus, the ‘musical gender’ (Moisala 1999) of Tamu women was determined by the molarized binary gender order as well as formed by age and marital status.12 Now, twenty years later, the gender-related social norms had obviously changed because women were providing public musical performances. A retired teacher, Shova Gurung, explained that Āma Samuha had been established a few years ago. After the village men, with the help of a German aid agency, had built a water pipeline (using gravitational flow) that brings fresh water from a well on a nearby mountain, women, whose duty it had been to carry water, had an hour or two more time each day. As a result of discussions regarding what do with this free time, they established Āma Samuha, the purpose of which is to work toward developing the village and maintaining its culture. Shova Gurung described this as ‘we come together

See Andors (1976) and Moisala (1991). See Moisala (1991, 1994). 12 Musical gender refers to the particularities of performance of gender in relation to music (Moisala 1999). 10 11

136

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

and perform when there are guests and villagers working abroad who come to visit. Gradually we save the money and use it for developmental work in our society and to help people in need.’13 Like men before them, the women started to give musical performances in order to collect money. At first, they were resisted, mocked and ridiculed. Shova Gurung explained, ‘I began to perform [music and dance] in public even though I am a daughter of a rich family. My dancing broke down the bad system of prejudices.’ Many men told me how they, at first, disliked the idea of women giving public musical performances. Yet when they saw what women could do with the money earned by music-making, they accepted and even began to enjoy women’s active partaking in the development of village life. In 2016, I witnessed a couple of men temporarily joining the women to perform. In 2013, the announcement of the coming performance was shouted at sunrise by a man walking around the village. At sunset, women gathered in the courtyard of a house of my Tamu relatives.14 Their bodies spoke of open-air life with much physical labor. Three women had a drum; some others carried flower garlands and other decorations. As before, rice mats were spread on the ground for the singers and audience to sit on, and a small dancing area was cleared in the middle of the courtyard. The women of the house put a kettle on the open fireplace inside the house. The air filled with talk and laughter. The audience, which consisted mainly of older men and children, gathered. The performance began with a blessing sung without accompaniment.15 The words of the blessing state how everything and everybody is from the same wholeness and source, and connected with each other. After the blessing, women started to sing the popular Nepalese lok gīt 16 and dohorī17 songs, as well as local songs, to the accompaniment of three double-headed cylinder-shaped mādal drums. The drums circulated from one woman to another while two to three women took turns as dancers. Most often, one of the women sang the first verse, which was then followed by a refrain sung by everyone. The words of the songs addressed aspects of everyday

Citations from the field material are translated from Tamu-kwai combined with Nepali by Tanka Gurung and the author. The quoted interviews were held in Klinu in November 2013. 14 I am regarded as a member of the late khlevri shaman Bhasu Gurung’s family. Creating family bonds outside of blood-relations is a Tamu custom. 15 This performance began with a blessing, which is not usually sung at Āma Samuha events. 16 Lok gīt is a genre that was created by the studio musicians of the state-run Radio Nepal, in the 1960s and1970s, for the purposes of unifying diverse ethnic groups of Nepal (Grandin 1989). It includes collected and composed folk melodies accompanied by folk instruments, such as mādal and sarangī, a bowed string instrument made of one block of wood. 17 In dohorī songs, the participants – usually a man and a woman – perform by creating words to a short sung verse that is followed by a refrain sung by the people present. It is a popular pastime all over Nepal (Moisala 1991; Stirr 2009). 13

‘A PEOPLE TO COME’ IN HIMAL AYAN VILL AGE MUSIC

137

village life, the beauty of the Himalayan nature and love. After one and a half hours, the performance ended with a tika blessing delivered by dancers to all participants (other dancers, audience members). The amount I paid for the performance was loudly announced to everyone present, a custom that allows community accountability and record-keeping about money earned. Monetary exchanges involved in the Āma Samuha activities toward economics-related developments of the village society produce social and material transformations. Village life is improved thanks to women’s musical practices. Public music-making for material gains of the village also provides the women with a new empowered position in the village society. Chandi Kumari Gurung described how Āma Samuha activities have given women the power to decide upon the use of money earned, particularly the ways developing the village, which empowers them to carry out development projects in the village community: We can decide by ourselves how to invest and use the money we have earned by making music. We do not need to ask the fathers or other groups of the village. We call together a meeting and discuss amongst ourselves about our plans to use the money . … Now we are planning to open a center for old people in the old school building. Today, our mothers’ group is very influential in promoting our village. We can do much more to develop our village. Rather than being passive products of established socioeconomic structures, through Āma Samuha, village women reconstitute themselves in their social and material lives. These musical performances have created lines of flight regarding the traditional Tamu gender order and are reconfiguring the conditions of Tamu women. Thus, the gender category of a Tamu woman has acquired novel forms in new intersections (Lykke 2010). Kashi Gurung stated that ‘the activities [of the mothers’ group] make me feel great because women have power and they have achieved so many things in the village, such as the community house, [Buddhist] Ghumba temple and added social and cultural awareness [among the villagers]. We feel very proud and happy about this and we wish to do more.’

Rituality and affective work Musical events that repeat the same structure from one performance occasion to the next – like performances arranged by the Tamu villagers including Āma Samuha events – may be viewed as rituals that promote liminal betweenness with potential for transition, transformation and creation (Turner 1974). Drawing from Deleuze and Guattari (1994), anthropologist Bruce Kapherer (2004: 47–48) states that the virtuality of

138

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

the ritual means a real and complete reality of its own, and he believes that the rituality of an event moves away from the chaos of the everyday life and slows down its tempo. Ritual is about descending into a reality of the virtual; ‘the virtual of rite is a means for engaging immediately with the very ontological ground of being’ (49). Like rituals, all structurally patterned musical events consist of a set of repeated actions. They create a time and space out of the ordinary, engaging their participants in a special kind of temporal, spatial, social and sensory existence. In this respect, a musical event also occurs without any representational symbolic relation to external realities. Therefore, it has the capacity to reconstruct, restore and introduce new elements. Experiencing Āma Samuha performances as communal times outside of the everyday was also frequently emphasized by the participants. For instance, Jhapindra Kumari Gurung described how ‘listening to music and when many people come together, makes them enjoy, they feel happy and [experience a] relief from the tensions of the everyday’. Padam Gurung continued that she loves to watch musical performances because ‘everyone stops working and enjoys … everyone looks happier [at the performances] … we forget our griefs’. The rituality of musical performances adds to their affective power to facilitate becoming. As cultural theorist Brian Massumi explains (2009: 1–2), affect according to Deleuze and Guattari as well as Spinoza can be understood as a basic transition, or a qualitative change, in a type of being’s state and powers of existence. Here, I take affect as a connective movement that enhances the processes of becoming (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 1994; Coleman 2005) and as a way to discuss how something may impact human bodies even in preconscious ways. It is ‘a transformative force, a process of modulation that inevitably goes beyond that which is consciously captured as feeling’ (Thomson and Biddle 2013: 7). Although the transitional process also may not be conscious, its impacts are clearly observable as shifts in ways of acting, felt experience and ways of thinking. The Āma Samuha performance achieves affective work through participant perception that draws the participants within its space and time, re-embodying, reorienting and re-ontologizing them. Physically, music consists of sound waves that penetrate human bodies influencing the blood circulation, gastric motility, muscular tension, reflexes, biochemical responses as well as heart and pulse rates (Hallam et  al. 2016: 183). A much less-studied effect of musicking on human participants lies in the togetherness it can create (Veblen et al. 2013). Dancing and making music together in a group are situations of muscular bonding, which strengthens social cohesion (McNeill 1995: 151). In Āma Samuha, women come together to sing, play and dance in synchrony with one another, with each action deeply embodied. The sensibilities of the event of musicking are heightened by the experienced togetherness among the densely packed audience, the members of which may also become inspired to sing and dance.

‘A PEOPLE TO COME’ IN HIMAL AYAN VILL AGE MUSIC

139

The perceptual dynamics of the event outside of the everyday, which involve its embodiments and perceptual experiences as well as cultural significances and connotations, has an effect and affect upon those involved in it. Affect always occurs within relations with other beings and bodies. In Āma Samuha, musicking creates encounters between sounds, environments, human minds and bodies, non-human beings and materialities, such as musical instruments. Humans approach non-human powers whose blessing together with various material arrangements, such as setting the stage and decorating the space, create the special out-of-theordinary frame for the event in which the sounds and togetherness affect human bodies including in preconscious ways. Affects arise from relations between the human and non-human, the material and immaterial, as well as the social and physical. They are conditioned by accumulated histories of beings undergoing such transition. Thus, the village community with its shared history and relations created in between the components of the event are involved in forming its affects. Considering these dimensions, affect can reconfigure the very capacities of being – the capacities to feel, to participate in occasions and to stumble across new connections, courses of action and thoughts. Examined from this perspective, a musical event is less about discrete individual bodies and their subsequent encounters with other pre-given entities than about an event of emergent potentiality created by its affective work.

Embodiment and transformation As an assemblage, a Āma Samuha event evolves in encounters between a variety of components that are affected by their interconnectedness producing different kinds of semiotic, material and social flows simultaneously. For instance, women’s bodies relating with the performance area usually occupied by men and children transforms the meaning of both a Tamu woman and public performance while it also effects the social codes of the village milieu. Encounters between women performers and non-human powers both enforce and transform the social flows of the village. The interconnections between women’s bodies, sounds and drums also take part in the transformative material and social flows of the event. Culture, as well as the skills of music-making are learned and embodied through repetition. As cultural theorist Carrie Noland writes, ‘culture is both embodied and challenged through corporeal performance, that is, through kinetic acts as they contingently reiterate learned behaviors’ (2009: 2). New sensory and bodily experiences, also those involved in learning to make music and dance, can lead to modifications of the everyday. They invite changes, because ‘performing gestures can generate sensations that are notyet-marked, not-yet-meaningful’ (17).

140

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

At the Āma Samuha event, there were over twenty performers present: singers, players and dancers, who were middle-aged and older women from different Tamu clans.18 Some of them had been active dancers and musicians in their youth, but when they got married or older, they had left music. For them, singing, playing and dancing now as an adult was about refreshing embodied memories. For others who had never made music or danced, it was about learning completely new ways to use the body. When mature women begin to make music, they have to open their rusty voices to make their voices heard, as well as to learn how to use their hands and arms to play drums and move their bodies in order to dance, which they found to be a very satisfactory activity. Chandi Kumari Gurung said, ‘[w]hen I was young, I did not play mādal, I never played it and I never was taught to play it, I just saw people playing and then learnt from watching it . … When I now sing, play and dance together [with other mothers], I enjoy it and feel very happy’. I was in a position to observe when Japindra Gurung danced for the first time. She giggled, closed her eyes and moved to the music, holding her arms wide open. After a while she opened her eyes and diminished her movements before leaving the floor, again giggling. In the evening, she told me how she felt shy when dancing but, afterwards, she also was happy; dancing made her feel free. For Japindra, as well as for other village women, the new embodied skills and experiences of making music meant transcending social restrictions imposed by the Tamu gender order.

Āma Samuha events and ‘a People to Come’ Deleuzian and Guattarian thought emphasizes the in-between processes of becoming and preconscious transformation that opens up to the future. At the Āma Samuha musical event, it is the singing, dancing and drumming female bodies – which my consultants tended not describe experientially in detail – that possess a powerful agency toward becoming-women, and re-ontologize the molar gender category of a Tamu woman. Nevertheless, it would be incorrect to claim that it is only music-making with its various encounters that has empowered women and brought about the change in the molar gender system of the village. During the past decades, men’s absence due to work in the cities and abroad has already given the women increasing responsibilities in domestic and village life. However, Āma Samuha activities have ‘staged’ this increased power and responsibility.

There are different kinds of gender performances in Tamu society and music. However, the discussion here focuses only on the molar category of a Tamu woman and its transformations. 18

‘A PEOPLE TO COME’ IN HIMAL AYAN VILL AGE MUSIC

141

Furthermore, if approached from within Deleuzian-Guattarian philosophy, it is not enough to observe and conceive of the body only as a corporeal human body, but rather one conceives a body of relations and affects, a body which is defined by the ‘material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness … ; the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 287). Thus, the body comes into being through relations; bodies are affected and they affect through their relations (Deleuze 1992: 625). When seeing female corporeal bodies participating in and through affective relations of the body, the musical event is not about individual fixed bodies but about its potential. From this perspective, the new expressive embodiments of these performers entangled with other materialities, cosmologies and discursive forces create affects and intensities that carry potential transformative vitality for the whole milieu. Examining this becoming may be a key to anticipating the futures and forms of the emerging village community. When Āma Samuha performances are examined as events, in this kind of affective and holistic perspective, the powerful agency possessed by the women performers and their musicking, singing, dancing and drumming female bodies is revealed. The new expressive embodiments of the performers and the socioeconomic positions they have claimed for themselves through these musical activities, when connected with other materialities, cosmologies and discursive forces, create affects and intensities that carry potential transformative vitality for the whole village milieu. There are already signs of how these women’s performances, by introducing new possibilities for village life, are not only deterritorializing the category of Tamu woman and transforming the Tamu gender order but also opening a way for ‘the Tamu people to come’. Shova Gurung explained how the new practices introduced by Āma Samuha performances are producing more equal social practices that do not only concern women performing music, but also other formerly marginalized groups: In the past, it was the custom in Klinu that only poor people should perform [music] and men used to say that women should not perform in public. But after we women are united and have started to perform, not only poor but everyone, women, poor, rich [can perform], no division in performing . … Today, men do not boycott our performances, but they also support Āma Samuha. By bringing to public music-making married, middle-aged and older women, who may be poorer or richer, and of different Tamu castes, Āma Samuha events are introducing a more socially equal community. Their musical performances have made these changes visible, audible and public, and have encouraged similar changes also in other contexts. Performers of

142

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

other musical events have also begun to break the norms of the traditional Tamu caste system, which still today is a strong social divider among the Tamus. For instance, in 2016, a girl from the higher char jāt caste was chosen to dance in a Ghātu performance, which formerly was entirely the domain of only people from the sora jāt caste. These music-related acts function as deterritorializing effects in the rather rigid Tamu social order. Even though the musical pieces and sounds may not be new, a musical event as a ritualistic communal event involving various kinds of affective components and relations possesses the potential to fabulate ‘a people to come’.

Music and emerging village milieu In this chapter, I have examined Klinu village as a milieu for musical performances, particularly for the Āma Samuha of the village women. My study was inspired by the villagers’ current need to focus on the future. Political restlessness of the country and economic insecurity experienced by the villagers prompted them to address future survival. Klinu is a relatively isolated milieu, which seeks to overcome material constraints via togetherness and reciprocity. These emphases are also part of the musical activities of the village. The village milieu functions as a social system which defines what music and its aesthetics are. It also provides forums for musical performances and social norms, including those relating to gender, which regulate musical activities. Before Āma Samuha activities broke the norm, public music-making was regarded as an activity only for children and men of sora-jāt castes, as well as people of lower castes than the Tamu. Furthermore, the village milieu is always becoming, in the process of renewal. As a thoroughly social and embodied domain of artistic expression, music-making is participating in these processes of transformation. As an assemblage, the Āma Samuha performance is an entanglement of a variety of components that play either material or expressive roles (DeLanda 2006: 253). In addition to involving the performers, their bodies and newly refreshed or learned bodily movements, sound waves, instruments and other material specificities of the event, various material and discursive aspects of the entire village milieu are entangled in the performance assemblage. Because using assemblage as an analytical concept is not only about listing its components but also about examining its functions as a virtual potentiality, I suggest that musical performances should be approached as events in the Deleuzian-Guattarian sense of the word; events have the capacity to transform and change. Approaching the Āma Samuha performance as an event moves the ethnomusicological

‘A PEOPLE TO COME’ IN HIMAL AYAN VILL AGE MUSIC

143

analysis of musical performances from the ethnographic descriptions of what-who-how-when-where-why into asking: What does this event do and how is it becoming? To conclude, Deleuzian-Guattarian philosophy is strongly guided by future-oriented ethical questions, such as: What do assemblages allow the formation of collective bodies that expand their capacities to open new modes of affecting and being affected? In this chapter, I investigated how a musical event when approached as a milieu-maker, assemblage, ritual and affective work is expanding the capacities of a community. The study has argued that not only composers and musical works – as stated by Deleuze and Guattari – but also musical performances as embodied social events can create new ways of experiencing and being social and, therefore, fabulate and produce ‘a people to come’. Musical events are also one of the foremost things among the cultural technologies of the body. They are sites where we learn how to experience socially mediated patterns of kinetic energy, being in time, emotions, desire and pleasure. At the same time, new bodily acts and experiences of musicmaking produce new sensations. Even though the performance may seem to repeat an already-known pattern, to cite Deleuze, ‘the external return does not bring back “the same” but returning constitutes the only same of that which becomes’ (1994: 41). In addition to the sounds organized and performed as works or pieces of music, the affective dimensions of performing and listening, as well as the ritualistic patterning of musical events make them powerful means of social transformation. The affective work of musical performances is not only about the sounds, their human makers and listeners but, as an event, they entangle with a variety of ecological, social and material components and, therefore, involve the whole re-emerging milieu. A musical performance is a social and communal event that works through participant perception. It draws participants within its special space and time, reorienting them. Like a ritual, it is ‘a dynamic field of force in whose virtual space human psychological, cognitive, and social realities are forged anew, so that … participants are both reoriented to their ordinary realities and embodied with potencies to restore or reconstruct their lived worlds’ (Kapherer 2004: 51). The performative, embodied and embodying nature of music, as well as its ability to alter the state of mind as a ritualistic performance, allows a fruitful, if not a radical, setting for new kinds of sensations and sensibilities. In addition, because social and political are inseparable from sensations, they eventually transgress the boundaries of any society. Thus, the Deleuzian-Guattarian study of musical performance as an event and an assemblage allows the hearing of the voice of ‘a people to come’, and the viewing of possibilities for new kinds of life that push current limits.

144

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Acknowledgments I thank Professor Om Gurung and M.A. Tanka Gurung for sharing their insights of the Tamu culture with me. A grant from the Swedish Literary Society in Finland supported my study.

References Field material Video and audio recordings, as well as photographs of Āma Samuha performance, Klinu, 15 November 2013 and 9 May 2016. Interviews and other discussions, Klinu, with Shova Gurung, Nandajung Gurung, Padam Kumari Gurung, Kashi Gurung, Chandra Prasad Gurung, Phul Kumari Gurung, Muni Kumari Gurung, Poonam Gurung, Pas Bahadur Gurung, Ram Chandra Gurung, Jhapindra Kumari Gurung, Man Bahadur Gurung, Gupta Bahadur Gurung, Yog Maya Gurung, Chandi Kumari Gurung, Indra Gurung and Chandra Prasad Gurung.

Literature Albertsen, N. and B. Diken (2006), ‘Society with/out Organs’, in M. Fuglsang and B. M. Sorensen (eds), Deleuze and the Social, 231–250, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Andors, E. (1976), ‘The Rodi: Female Associations among the Gurung of Nepal’, Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, New York. Askew, K. (2002), Performing the Nation: Swahili Music and Cultural Politics in Tanzania. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Biehl, J. and P. Locke (2010), ‘Deleuze and the Anthropology of Becoming’, Current Anthropology, 51 (3): 317–351. Bogue, R. (2003), Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts, New York: Routledge. Bogue, R. (2007), Deleuze’s Way. Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing. Colebrook, C. (2002), Gilles Deleuze, London and New York: Routledge. Coleman, F. (2005), ‘Affect’, in A. Parr (ed.), The Deleuze Dictionary, 11–13, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. DeLanda, M. (2006), ‘Deleuzian Social Ontology and Assemblage Theory’, in M. Fuglsang, and B. M. Sorensen (eds), Deleuze and the Social, 250–267, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Deleuze, G. (1990), The Logic of Sense, trans. M. Lester and C. Stivale, V. Boundas, New York: Columbian University. Deleuze, G. (1992), ‘Ethology: Spinoza and Us’, in J. Crary and S. Kwinter (eds), Incorporations, 625–633, New York: Zone.

‘A PEOPLE TO COME’ IN HIMAL AYAN VILL AGE MUSIC

145

Deleuze, G. (1994), What Is Philosophy?, trans. B. Burchell and H. Tomlinson, London: Verso. Deleuze, G. (1997), Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and C. Parnet (1987), Dialogues, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam, London: Athlone. Feld, S. (1990), Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, Durham: Duke University Press. Grandin, I. (1989), Music and Media in Local Life. Music Practice in a Newar Neighbourhood in Nepal, Linköping: Linköping University. Hallam, S., I. Cross and M. Thaut (2016), The Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology, 2nd edn, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herndon, M. and N. McLeod (1981), Music as Culture, Darby, PA: Norwood Editions. Kapherer, B. (2004), ‘Ritual Dynamics and Virtual Place. Beyond Representation and Meaning’, Social Analysis, 48 (2): 35–54. Kisliuk, M. (2001), Seize the Dance!: BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lykke, N. (2010), Feminist Studies. A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing, New York and London: Routledge. Massumi, B. (1987), ‘Translator’s Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy’, in G. Deleuze and F. Guattari (eds), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, ix–xvii, London: Continuum. Massumi, B. (2009), ‘Of Microperception and Micropolitics: An Interview with Brian Massumi, 15 August 2008’, Inflexions: A Journal of Research-Creation 1 (3): 1–20. Available online: http://www.senselab.ca/inflexions/volume_3/node _i3/massumi_en_inflexions_vol03.html (accessed 6 June 2016). McNeil, W. H. (1995), Keeping Together in Time, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Merriam, A. P. (1964), The Anthropology of Music, Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Middleton, R. (2012), ‘Introduction: Music Studies and the Idea of Culture’, in M. Clayton, T. Herbert and R. Middleton (eds), The Cultural Study of Music. A Critical Introduction, 2nd edn, 1–15, New York and London: Routledge. Moisala, P. (1991), Cultural Cognition in Music. Continuity and Change in the Gurung Music Culture of Nepal, Jyväskylä: Gummerus. Moisala, P. (1994), ‘Gurung Music in Terms of Gender’, Etnomusikologian vuosikirja, 6: 135–146. Moisala, P. (1999), ‘Gender Performance in Music’, Women and Music, Journal on Gender and Culture in Music, 3: 1–17. Mumford, S. R. (1990), Himalayan Dialogue. Tibetan Lamas and Gurung Shamans in Nepal, Kathmandu: Tiwari’s Pilgrims Book House. Noland, C. (2009), Agency and Embodiment. Performing Gestures/Producing Culture, Harvard: Harvard University Press.

146

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Patton, P. (2006), ‘Order, Exterioty and Flat Multiplicities in the Social’, in M. Fuglsang and B. M. Sorensen (eds), Deleuze and the Social, 21–39, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Seeger, A. (1980), ‘Sing for Your Sister. The Structure and Performance of Suyá Akia’, in N. McLeod and M. Herndon (eds), The Ethnography of Musical Performance, 7–43, Norwood, PA: Norwood Editions. Shelemay, K. K. (2009), ‘Performing the humanities at the Ethiopian Millennium’, Daedalus, 138 (1): 105–109. Small, C. (1998), Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Spivak, G. C. (1988), ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’, in C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 271–313, Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Stirr, A. (2009), Exchanges of Song: Migration, Gender, and Nation in Nepali Dohori Performance, Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, New York. Stokes, M. (1994), Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place. Oxford: Berg. Strickland, S. (1982), Beliefs, Practices and Legends in Gurung Narrative Poetry, Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, Jesus College, UK. Thanem, T. and S. Lindstead (2006), ‘The Trembling Organisation: Order, Change and the Philosophy of the Virtual’, in M. Fuglsang and B. M. Sorensen (eds), Deleuze and the Social, 39–58, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Thomson, M. and I. Biddle (2013), ‘Introduction: Somewhere between the Signifying and the Sublime’, in M. Thomson and I. Biddle (eds), Sound, Music, Affect. Theorizing Sonic Experience, 1–25, London: Bloomsbury. Tiainen, M. (2012) Becoming-Singer. Cartographies of Singing, Music-Making and Opera. Turku: Uniprint. Titon, J. (1997), ‘Knowing Fiedwork’, in G. F. Barz and T. J. Cooley (eds), Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, 87–100, New York: Oxford University Press. Turner, V. (1974), Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Veblen, K. K., S. J. Messenger, M. Silverman and D. J. Elliott, eds (2013), Community Music Today, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Education.

PART THREE

Experiments

7 Experimental Music and the Question of What a Body Can Do Marie Thompson

Experimental music practices have frequently been preoccupied with exploring the potentials and capacities of different sound-making devices – be they ‘conventional’ instruments, everyday objects, recording media or human bodies. Artists have sought to generate and modify sounds, textures and rhythmic patterns by interrogating the different ways and extent to which instruments, bodies, media and objects can move, resist, act, react, affect and be affected by other entities and environments. In this chapter, I propose that much of experimental music can be understood to interrogate the ‘not yet knowing’ of Baruch Spinoza’s (III/P2 Schol.) famous axiom: ‘no one has yet determined what a body can do’. The performing and listening body and the embodied dimensions of sonic experience have been central to much scholarship in the field of ‘cultural’ musicology (Brett et  al. 1994; DiNora 2000). However, the ‘body’ to which Spinoza refers is not just the human body-as-subject. Rather, as Gilles Deleuze’s (1988, 1992) ‘appropriation’ of his work highlights, Spinoza’s particular, nonanthropocentric conceptualization of the body means that a body might be a human body, but it might also be an electronic circuit, a performer with an instrument or an improvising collective. I explore the Spinozan-Deleuzian, non-anthropocentric notion of the body and the question of ‘what a body can do?’ in relation to three rather different artistic examples: American composer Alvin Lucier’s Music on

150

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

a Long Thin Wire (1977), the music of improvising cellist Okkyung Lee; and the composer and media artist Yasunao Tone – all of which can be understood to explore the audio-affective capacities of instruments, assemblages and media technologies. By using the term ‘audio-affective’, I mean to draw attention to the connection between sound and affect, in that an exploration of these bodies’ affective capacities is also an exploration of their sound-making capacity. In short, new sound-making potentials are discovered through interrogating what a body can do. Through these examples, I argue Spinoza’s philosophy provides a fruitful basis for a materialist account of experimental musical praxis. It can be used to capture something of the complex, affective relations that occur between performing bodies, instruments, media technologies and environments; helping us move beyond the insufficient binary between active musicking subjects (Small 1998) and passive musical objects. Though primarily focused on acts and relations of sound-making rather than ‘sound itself’, this Spinozan approach to experimental music praxis might be understood as a response to philosopher Christoph Cox’s (2011) call for a ‘sonic materialism’ appropriate to the sonic arts. For Cox, sound art’s failure to generate critical and theoretical scholarly responses is due to the prevalence of discursive, linguistic and semiotic modes of analysis that have been developed in relation to the visual and the textual. By leaving little space for the material (that which exists in excess of but is often entangled with signification, discourse and the text), these models struggle to account for some sonic arts practices. As shall be demonstrated, the sonic arts have frequently interrogated and foregrounded the materiality of sound and sound-making. Yet an awareness of sound’s material dimensions is not exclusive to experimental music and sound art. As an occasional musician who has played in range of styles and contexts – from orchestral music to free improvisation and noise rock; from concert halls to DIY spaces – I am aware that many music practitioners working in a variety of genres have an intimate understanding of music’s materiality. Classical musicians working with acoustic instruments, for example, are tasked with ‘playing the room’: they play with (not just in spite of) the space and its fluctuations in temperature, pressure and humidity. Consequently, I recognize Cox’s sonic materialism as a call for theoretical work pertaining to the sonic arts to reflect upon and develop from what is already known through practice. This Spinozan approach to experimental music, alongside Cox’s sonic materialism, also has a number of complementary resonances with socalled ‘new’ or ‘neo’ materialism, insofar as it recognizes non-human materiality as active, affective and dynamic rather than passive and inert. Indeed, both Deleuze and Deleuze’s Spinoza have been influential in the formation of new materialist metaphysics. Just as I aim to complicate the relation between active musical subjects and passive musical objects, new materialism has sought to radically rethink dualisms that have been central

EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC AND WHAT A BODY CAN DO

151

to many lineages of Euro-American thought: nature/culture, body/mind, material/ideal inhuman/human (Dolphijn and van der Tuin 2012). It does so by recognizing the ways in which the material (e.g. bodies, environments and atmospheres) is entangled with and inextricable from the seemingly immaterial (e.g. thought, meaning, language and discourse). Consequently, new materialism, like experimental music, prioritizes relationality, transformation, process and change.

The artist formerly known as the composer As with many generic terms, experimental music can be difficult to define: it is used to refer to a wide range of musical practices, movements and artists that occupy a variety of sites – from concert halls to DIY music venues, clubs and public ‘happenings’. Likewise, experimental music, insofar as it is used to identify a set of artistic principles, often incorporates a range of genres and subgenres – including but not limited to free improvisation, free jazz, glitch music,1 noise and drone music. Furthermore, the influence of experimental music can be found within what are often considered to be more mainstream or conventional genres, such as pop music, rock, electronica and hip hop (Cox and Warner 2006; Demers 2010). Experimental music might be taken rather broadly to refer to any music which involves unusual, unconventional and idiosyncratic practices. However, as musicologist Joanna Demers (2010: 7) highlights, ‘experimentalism’ is historically contingent – it is constituted in relation to the mainstream musical norms and conventions of a particular period. Thus a practice that was deemed ‘experimental’ in 1985 could have inspired what was conventional in 1990. For artist and writer Brandon LaBelle (2006: 9), experimental music pertains to a legacy that is characterized by a shift away from music and toward sound; and ‘from the symbolic and representational (music) to the phenomenal and nonrepresentational (noise)’ (9). In this regard, experimental music is not interested in sound as it is found within harmonic structures and melodic lines; ‘but as it is found within the everyday environment of noise; the procedures of a music of a moment’. When it is understood as a compositional tradition, experimental music is often defined in opposition to the institutional avant-garde. For the composer Michael Nyman (1999), experimental music refers primarily to North American musical movement from the mid-twentieth century, which

Glitch is a genre of electronic music that makes use of the sounds and processes of the audio glitch and other sonic artifacts associated with digital errors. Yasunao Tone’s Solo for Wounded CD, which I will discuss later, is one of the earliest examples of glitch music. 1

152

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

begins with and stems from the work of John Cage. While experimental music is understood to concern itself with indeterminacy and with it, chance, non-conventional notation, open scores and the conceptual; avantgarde music, by contrast, is ‘conceived and executed along a well-trodden but sanctified path of the post-Renaissance tradition’ (1). Musicologist Joaquim Benitez (1978: 66–68), similarly, draws a distinction between traditional, avant-garde and experimental music. While avant-garde music is concerned with intentionality – that is, ‘its desire to fix and control sounds’ – experimentalism is concerned with ‘indeterminacy’. Yet, in an era where artists can be simultaneously influenced by Xenakis and techno; by Pauline Oliveros and punk, this rigid historical distinction between experimental music and the institutional avant-garde appears somewhat simplistic in that it does not allow for the exchange of influence between different musical movements, artists and epochs. Perhaps even more ambiguous are the boundaries between experimental music and sound art. Much contemporary sound art draws upon or is influenced by experimental music practices; many experimental music practitioners share similar aesthetic and conceptual interests with sound artists. Indeed, LaBelle’s markers of experimental music – a concern with the non-representational, phenomenal and everyday environment of noise  – could be easily applied to sound art. Artists such as Annea Lockwood, Christina Kubrich and Alvin Lucier might be referred to as both practitioners of sound art and experimental music. For the purposes of this chapter, I uphold no clear distinction between experimental music and sound art, although it is important to note that a number of given examples could be categorized as both. Experimental music has been frequently concerned with notions of process, open-endedness and relationality, e.g. the relations between: listener, composer and performer; score and performance; intentional sounds and unintentional noises; music and other art forms. In other words, experimental music emphasizes music’s status as a verb – a doing, becoming or happening, rather than a noun – an object or a thing. As Nyman states: ‘Experimental composers are by in large not concerned with prescribing a defined time-object whose materials, structuring and relationships are calculated and arranged in advance, but more excited by the prospect of outlining a situation in which sounds may occur, a process of generating action (sounding or otherwise), a field delineated by certain compositional rules’ (Nyman 1999: 4, original emphasis). These preoccupations are typically accompanied by a corresponding change in the way the role of the composer (or indeed the composer-performer) is understood. As Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (2006) note, ‘if the traditional composer is akin to an omnipotent God, who structures and controls all aspects of a musical performance, the experimental composer is in

EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC AND WHAT A BODY CAN DO

153

the position of the ordinary human being, who may initiate events but is powerless to control their destiny’ (208). This is not to deny that certain experimental composers have been treated as canonical ‘Gods’ – for example, one need only consider the frequent positioning of Cage as the forefather [sic.] of experimental music.2 Nonetheless, many experimental music practices facilitate a decentring of the composer, in favour of an acknowledgement of other generative and productive forces. In other words, the composer comes to be understood as one creative force amongst many – they contribute to but do not fully determine the sonic event. These forces that shape the outcome of a performance, event or piece could be other human actors, such as performers and audience members. Such is the case with pieces such as Terry Riley’s In C (1964), in which performers control the pace at which they progress through musical phrasings and the number of repetitions of each phrase; or live performances by the Los Angeles band Lucky Dragons, which employ both improvisation and audience collaboration so as to create ‘equal power-sharing situations’ (Segal 2008). These creative, generative forces might also pertain to the non-human, such as the actions of (non-human) animals. For instance, Céleste BoursierMougenot’s sound installation, From Hear to Ear, first exhibited in 1999, consists of a flock of zebra finches and amplified steel piano strings.3 The behavioral patterns and actions of the finches – the sound of the birds landing upon, alighting from, moving around and pecking the amplified wires, in combination with the finches’ birdsong – generate the sonic content of the piece. Apropos a more recent version of the installation at Peabody Essex Museum, which uses amplified guitars rather than piano strings; Boursier-Mougenot (2014) describes it as a piece ‘that’s impossible for humans to play’. Alternatively, these generative, non-human forces could be the vibrational and atmospheric forces within a particular milieu.4 In Alvin Lucier’s Music While Cage is undoubtedly an important figure in the history of experimental music, his name has tended to dominate discussions of it; and he has often been positioned as the founder of experimental music (for example, see Nyman 1999; LaBelle 2006). For a critique of Cage’s positioning in experimental music discourse, see Rodgers (2010). 3 Other versions of the Bournier-Mougenot’s installation have used a range of objects involving metal wiring, including electric guitars and coat hooks. 4 In his notes on translation in A Thousand Plateaus, Brian Massumi notes that in French, the term ‘milieu’ has three meanings: surroundings, medium and middle. Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term combines all three meanings (Massumi in Deleuze and Guattari 2010: xvii). In the context of this chapter, milieu pertains to the surrounding environment in which soundmaking occurs, as well as the medium through which sound passes. As with Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term, the milieu is understood to be both vibratory and relational. 2

154

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

on a Long Thin Wire (1977), the presence and movements of audience members  – and, relatedly, environmental factors such as temperature, humidity and air currents – affect the piece’s material components, that is, the long thin wire, and consequently influence the sonic outcome. Lucier’s piece consists of a wire extended across a large room and connected to amplifiers and a sine wave oscillator. A magnet is attached to the wire, which causes the wire to vibrate. Contact microphones embedded in wooden bridges and placed underneath the wire pick up these vibrations and send them through the playback system. Lucier describes how he was unhappy with playing the wire in solo pieces and in collaborations, as the music never went beyond ‘a kind of poetic improvisation’. Lucier thus decided to ‘remove [his] hand from the musical’. He states: I discovered by carefully tuning the oscillator, the wire could be left to sound by itself. Fatigue, air currents, heating and cooling, even human proximity could cause the wire to undergo enormous changes. In a dance studio in Kyoto, for example, visitors’ footsteps on the Marley floor caused extremely slight shifts in the positions of the tables to which the wire was clamped, causing spectacular changes in the sound of the wire. (Lucier 1992) Though Lucier as composer is responsible for the work’s conception and for creating the situation through which the piece emerges, it is the forces of the milieu that determine the piece’s sonic content and structure. Consequently, no two performances of the piece are the same.

What can a body do? Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire can be understood as an exploration of the transformative, generative relations of which the wire might be capable  – the ways and extent to which the wire, as well as the broader technological set-up, is affected by the material milieu. These relations are what generate the music of Music on a Long Thin Wire – the forces of the milieu cause the wire to vibrate in a particular manner, and these vibrations are translated into sound. In this sense, the wire is not to be thought of as a passive, inert material object that is to be controlled by an active musicking subject. Rather, in Lucier’s (1992) words, the wire is capable of playing itself. This conceptualization of Music on a Long Thin Wire complements Deleuze’s appropriation of the work of seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Much of Deleuze’s work, including that with Guattari, is underlined by a Spinozan metaphysics. Indeed, Deleuze published two books on Spinoza: Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza and Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. However, it is important to note that

EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC AND WHAT A BODY CAN DO

155

Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza is characteristically idiosyncratic – in Deleuze’s work, Spinoza acts and is acted upon by both Henri Bergson and, more frequently, Friedrich Nietzsche. As musicologist Amy Cimini (2012) notes, it might initially appear strange to consider music from a Spinozan perspective. By comparison to his philosophical counterpart Rene Descartes, Spinoza speaks relatively little of music. He has little to say on beauty and so has little to offer to musical aesthetics. Likewise, ‘if music belongs to the articulation of subjectivity, community or political agency along axes of racial, ethnic, class and/or sexual difference, Spinoza is a philosopher whose … ontology defines difference in terms of capacities and not on the basis of identity’. Yet as Cimini highlights, Spinoza’s philosophy has much to contribute to an understanding of sonic materiality and musical pleasure (87). Here, I argue that aspects of Spinoza’s philosophy can be usefully applied to a number of experimental music practices, insofar as it facilitates a non‑anthropocentric ecological perspective that emphasizes process, ­ materiality and transformation. This Spinozan perspective, furthermore, can be used to move beyond the apparent binary between passive, material objects and active musical subjects. As Lucier’s piece highlights, overcoming such an opposition is particularly pertinent in the context of experimental musical praxis, insofar as it often looks to utilize and draws attention to the generative, creative potential of the material and the non-human. The notion of affect is central to the philosophies of both Spinoza and Deleuze. In Spinoza’s work, there are two interconnected dimensions of affect: affectus (affect) and affectio (affection). L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affection (Spinoza’s affectio) is each state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second affecting body (Massumi in Deleuze and Guattari 2010: xvii). Affect/affectus, then, refers to a body’s varying capacity to act and to be acted on – its power to affect and be affected; while affection/affectio refers to how a body is affected – it indicates the state of a body as it is acted upon and thus modified by another, affecting body. How a body is affected depends on the extent of its capacity to affect and be affected; and a body’s capacity to affect and be affected is defined by its relations with other affecting bodies. Consequently, one affective power runs through another. Spinoza (III/Postulate 1) states: ‘The human body can be affected in many ways by which its power of activity is increased or diminished; and also in many other ways which neither increase nor diminish its power of activity’. If a body experiences a complementary or positive affective encounter with another body, then this corresponds with an increase in its power to act. Conversely, if a body experiences a negative or harmful affective encounter, then this corresponds with a

156

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

diminishment of its power to act. Alternatively, an affective encounter might be inconsequential, insofar as it results in no increase or diminishment of power. While Spinoza frequently makes reference to the human body, it is important to note that Spinoza’s affecting and affected body is not synonymous with the bordered and autonomous body-as-subject. Rather, as Deleuze (1988) makes clear, Spinoza’s notion of affectivity pertains to a particular, non-anthropocentric concept of the body. For Spinoza, a body is defined in accordance with two principles: what Deleuze refers to as its longitude and latitude. The longitude of a body can be understood as its composition of dynamic relations. As Spinoza (II/L3) states: ‘bodies are distinguished from one another in respect of motion and rest, quickness and slowness, and not by reason of substance’. A body, irrespective of size, is a composite of an infinite number of particles. These particles, which can be understood as simple bodies, exist in relations of motion and rest, of speed and slowness. A body’s latitude is its affective capacity – its power to act and be acted upon by other bodies, and the affections of which it is subsequently capable. Different bodies have different affective powers, as Deleuze (1992) explains: ‘A horse, a fish, a man, or even two men compared one with the other, do not have the same capacity to be affected: they are not affected by the same things, or not affected by the same things in the same way’ (217). The body of horse and a body of a fish (or indeed two human bodies) are different from one another in terms of their structural composition and it terms of what they can do – the affective relations that they can form with various entities and environments. Spinoza, then, does not define bodies by abstract notions of genus or species. Nor does it take the body to be natural or organic. Affect and motion traverse the imagined distinction between the organic and non-organic, the natural and artifice, inanimate things and animate beings. Consequently: ‘A [Spinozan] body can be anything; it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a collectivity’ (Deleuze 1988: 127). Alternatively, since they are composed of relations of motion and rest; and have a capacity to affect and be affected, a body might pertain to an electronic circuit, an audio-playback system, a musical ensemble or, as is the case with Music on a Long Thin Wire, a composite of wire, magnets, amplifiers and oscillators. Two questions thus frame the Spinozan body: what is the composition of a body, i.e. what is the structure of its relations; and what can a body do, i.e. how and to what extent can it affect and be affected by other bodies? However, it is important to emphasize that a body, defined in this way, does not exist with absolute autonomy and independence from other bodies. Rather, a Spinozan body is enmeshed within a network of relations: its affective capacity and dynamic composition are constituted by its extensive and affective relations with other bodies. In other words, the individual

EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC AND WHAT A BODY CAN DO

157

body – its structure and its power to act and be acted upon – is defined by its engagement with its wider milieu. A Spinozan body, perpetually engaged in the world, is open-ended and relational – it is continually affected, modified and transformed by other bodies. There are no definitive answers to the two questions that govern a body’s existence. It is not yet known what a body can do – the dynamic and affective relations of which it might be capable. Spinoza states: For indeed, no one has yet determined what the body can do, that is, experience has not yet taught anyone what the body can do from the laws of Nature alone … No one has yet come to know the structure of the body so accurately that he could explain all its functions – not to mention that many things are observed in the lower animals which far surpass human ingenuity, and that sleepwalkers do a great many things in their sleep which they would not dare to awake. This shows well enough that the body itself, simply from the laws of its own nature, can do many things which the mind wonders at. (Spinoza, III/P2 Schol.) As is explicated by Lucier’s wire (as well as Lee’s cello and Tone’s CD system), the more ways in which a body is affected, the more that is known about what a body can do. The various ways in which Lucier’s wire assemblage is affected (affectio) by its relations with other entities and the wider material milieu reveal something of the wire assemblage’s affective capacity (affectus). Yet this knowledge of what the wire assemblage can do – and of what a body can do – cannot precede its affectations. Consequently, Cartesian dualism’s prioritization of the mind and devaluation of the body is refuted. Contra Descartes’ dualism, Spinoza proposes a monist metaphysics. For Descartes, mind and body pertain to two different, distinct substances that can be considered independently of one another. For Spinoza, however, body and mind are different expressions of the same substance. While the immaterial mind of Cartesian dualism animates and controls the material body; the Spinozan body, in its interactions with other material bodies, is accompanied by the parallel production of mental knowledge and ideas. It is the unknown of the body with which Spinoza’s ethical project begins. To not yet know what a body can do is to know what power a body might have – the ways and extent to which it might affect and be affected. The affected and affecting body, then, is engaged in a process of discovery. The greater variety of affective encounters a body has, the more that is known about what a body can do; what affirmative or adverse relations it can form. For Spinoza, we should strive to maximize the body’s complementary, positive affective relations and minimize its destructive, negative encounters, insofar as positive affective relations are associated with an increase in a body’s affective power. In other words, to maximize a body’s complementary encounters with other bodies is to maximize its power of activity.

158

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

This ethical prioritization of exploring what a body might do – the ways in which it might act in relation to other bodies – has some interesting resonances with the practices of many experimental music artists. As noted earlier, much experimental music looks to explore the potentials of various sound-making devices – be they objects, musical instruments or human bodies. From a Spinozan perspective, all of these entities can be understood as bodies. Experimental music, then, can be understood to interrogate the audio-affective capacities of these bodies. In order to further consider the ways in which experimental practices can be productively viewed through a Spinozan lens, I now turn to two very different examples: the music of improvising cellist Okkyung Lee and media artist Yasunao Tone’s sonic experiments with Compact Disc technologies.

Okkyung Lee: What can a cello do? In the work of improviser and composer Okkyung Lee, the cello infrequently sounds how one might expect the instrument to sound. While her ‘formal’ training lies in classical music and jazz – she studied classical music in South Korea from a young age; and undertook university studies at Berklee College of Music – Lee incorporates a variety of musical influences into her playing style, including noise, free jazz and traditional South Korean music. In addition to her solo work, Lee has collaborated with a wide range of experimental and improvisatory artists, including Laurie Anderson, Ikue Mori, C Spencer Yeh, Christian Marclay, Lasse Marhaug and Maria Chavez. By comparison to some of the highly complex and elaborate setups of many of her peers in the experimental noise scene, Lee’s performance setup of herself, unamplified cello and bow could initially appear rather simplistic and conservative. However, from this, she derives an extremely broad spectrum of sounds, noises and timbres. Lee might be described as ‘deconstructing’ the cello during her visceral improvised performances. She bows, plucks, slaps and caresses the instrument, moving between dense, atonal noise generated by heavy-handed bowing; breathy and chirruping harmonics; popping, cracking and scratching sounds; and vigorous glissando passages. There are even points at which the cello is rendered barely recognizable. On her 2008 solo album I Saw the Ghost of the Unknown Soul and It Said …, the sound of the cello progresses through a variety of guises. On the ethereal And … there are moments where it sounds more akin to a flute or a pipe; while on the more frantic and percussive Five, the cello sometimes sounds as if it is being strummed like a guitar. Though Lee’s performance style has sometimes been described as aggressive or ‘violent’, she has denied that she is looking to be ‘shocking’ (Burnett 2013; Thomas 2013). While she uses a vocabulary that is ‘a little outside the norm’, Lee describes herself as ‘a very traditional person when it comes to making music … it’s really about paying attention to the sounds,

EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC AND WHAT A BODY CAN DO

159

and then also thinking about the structures, and to keep pushing myself in a way I want to go, somewhere that I haven’t gone to before’ (Thomas 2013). In Lee’s remarks, there appears to be an interesting tension between her selfidentification as a ‘conventional’ or ‘traditional’ musician; and her interest in pushing her playing into new terrain. She continues: I’m a cellist, I play cello, from the very beginning. I don’t play other instruments. I don’t play the cello as if it’s a guitar. I don’t do that. But I’m not trying to make it sound like a ‘cello’ either. Everything I do on cello, I think it’s doable by anybody who knows how to play the cello. Maybe I just go a little further than most other people would do. But then by doing that there’s another world that comes in, and a sound palette, and that’s fun for me. (Thomas 2013, my emphasis) By going a little further in her playing, Lee moves from the field of what the cello can do (that is, how the cello is ‘conventionally’ played) toward the question of what the cello might do. And by experimenting with what a cello might do – the different ways in which it might be put into motion, act and be acted on – Lee brings in another musical world, a new ‘sound palette’, new combinations of sound and vibration. This description of Lee’s playing would seem to implicitly restate the division between the active musical subject and passive musical object, as well as implying a linear notion of causality – Lee, as composer-performer, causes the cello to vibrate in particular ways and thus causes it to produce particular sounds. However, as noted previously, a Spinozan approach to musical practice facilitates a reconsideration of this perspective. For Spinoza, relations between bodies are transformative, insofar as contact always implies a modulation of affectivity for all bodies involved – human and non-human, organic and synthetic, ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’. In Lee’s live and recorded performances, we do not just hear her playing the cello, as it might be traditionally understood – the notes that are the outcome of her movements and actions on the instruments. What is also audible is the cello ‘reacting’. In other words, the cello acts as well as being acted upon; though, as Spinoza makes clear, neither of these states – action and reaction, acting and being acted upon – can be cleanly separated from one another. There are the incidental sounds that arise – the faint vibration of strings as the cello is struck. Yet even Lee’s most clear, ‘intentional’ tones can be understood as the response to a particular affective-dynamic relation, which involves both Lee and the material body of the cello. Indeed, this clear cello note – or any note – is the outcome of a combination of vibrational forces. As theorist Aden Evens explains: An open E-string bowed on a violin excites at once the string, the body of the violin, the other strings, the body of the violinist, the air around the violin, the material of the room, and the bodies of the listeners … the

160

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

sound, the total timbre of an instrument is never just that instrument, but that instrument in concert with all the other vibrations in the room, the other instruments, the creaking of chairs, even the constant, barely perceptible motion of the air. (Evens 2005: 6) Evens’ account echoes the ecological and relational view of a Spinozan approach – it makes apparent a more complex view of causality and the relationship between human and non-human action. From this perspective, an instrument’s sound is never simply the result of the performing subject acting upon a musical object. Rather, it arises from the vibration of the instrument, in combination with the vibrations of a particular space. The timbre of a sound is determined by the ways in which these vibrations from various sources affect and are affected by one another. In other words, as is exemplified by Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire, it is not just the performer that affects and is affected by an instrument; an instrument also affects and is affected by the vibrations of the milieu. In this sense, Lee might be thought of as a ‘traditional musician’ insofar as this mutual affectivity between instrument, performer and space is inherent to all musical performances. It has been suggested that Lee’s performances involves experimentation with what a body can do, insofar as she looks to explore the audioaffective capacities of the cello. However, it is necessary to consider what constitutes a body this context – what precisely is this body that is being explored? Taking the Spinozan definition of a body, Lee and the cello can be viewed not only as two distinct bodies – the human-body affecting the cello-body  – but also as a singular, composite body. This composite performing body exists in relation of motion and rest (when playing, Lee moves, is moved by and reacts to the movement of the cello) and has the capacity to affect and be affected. In other words, the human-body and the cello-body work collaboratively in performance – Lee does not just play, but plays with the cello. It is what this composite human-cello body can do, moreover, that is perpetually explored in Lee’s performances: what sounds and vibrational patterns can this composite body produce? In what ways can it move? Apropos Lee’s work, then, what might typically be thought of as a passive musical object or instrument can instead be conceptualized as an active and affective component in the musicking process. From this materialist perspective, the difference between performer-body and instrument-body – between the cello and Lee – is not one of substance, e.g. organic/inorganic, nor of consciousness, e.g. subject/object but of composition and affective capacity. Yet in performance Lee and the cello can also be understood as a composite body, while the musicking process involves an exploration of the relational, audio-affective capacities of this composite body – of what this composite body can do.

EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC AND WHAT A BODY CAN DO

161

Yasunao Tone: What can a compact disc do? While Okkyung Lee experiments with the audio-affective potentials of a more ‘traditional’ musical setup, Yasunao Tone’s work explores the generative, audio-affective capacities of recording media. Formerly an active member of the Tokyo Fluxus movement and the free improvisation collective Group Ongaku, Tone began to experiment with CD technologies in the 1980s. At the time of its emergence, the CD was advertised as a near noiseless technology, with Sony promoting the new medium under the tagline ‘Perfect Sound Forever’. Integral to the CD’s apparent ‘perfection’ was the medium’s error-correction system. On the surface of the CD, binary data is represented as a series of indented ‘pits’. When the disc is scanned by a laser, the pits change the way in which the light is reflected. These changes in light reflection are translated into data. A change from a pit to a non-indented section represents a one, while no differentiation represents a zero. When a disc is marked or scratched, then this can prevent the data from being read correctly. In such instances, the CD system uses redundant information on the disc to correct the error and reconstruct any lost content. When an error is too severe to be corrected through redundancy, CD systems use the error concealment technique of ‘interpolation’. Interpolation involves finding an average based on the uncorrupted, accurate data that comes before and after an error. Since audio waveforms are ordinarily largely continuous across a short amount of time, the player can use interpolation to ‘fill in the gaps’ created by a scratch on the CD surface. If both error correction and error concealment fail, then clicks and glitches become audible, and the CD might stall, skip or fail to play. In Tone’s work, the CD system takes on an alternative role. Rather than reproducing recorded sound as accurately as possible, the CD system – a ‘man-machine-disc’ assemblage (DeMarinis 2011) – becomes a generative instrument of artistic expression. Tone experimented with modifying the surface of the CD, so as to override the medium’s error correction system and, in doing so, affect both the playback process and create new sounds and rhythms. By overriding the correction system of the CD, Tone was able to unlock the sonic effects produced by error. His modifications of the CD surface caused the CD to act differently in playback in ways that had not been intended by is designers: A new technology, a new medium appears, and the artist usually enlarges the use of the technology … Deviates … The manufacturers always force us to use a product their way … However people occasionally find a way to deviate from the original purpose of the medium and develop a totally new field. (Marclay and Tone 2006: 344)

162

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

In 1984, Tone started using scotch tape with pinholes to affect the playback of CD recordings. As artist and theorist Paul DeMarinis notes, Tone’s modification of the CD surface is reminiscent of Cage’s ‘prepared’ piano, which was modified by inserting foreign objects into the strings so as to create a ‘percussion machine’ (DeMarinis 2011: 239). Tone’s first attempt involved a recording of Debussy’s Preludes. The modification of the CD surface affected the pitch, rhythm and speed of the original recording, as well as introducing a stuttering effect that was different with each playback of the CD. Tone recalls: ‘I was pleased with the result because the CD player behaved frantically and out of control. That was a perfect device for performance’ (Tone in Kelly 2009: 238). Sound artist and theorist Caleb Kelly (2009) states that Tone’s stuttering CD ‘extended the possibilities of performance … The sounds produced by the manipulated discs are never quite the same. This means that in performance, the performer has no clear idea of what is going to happen, making such things as scoring very difficult’ (238). The modified CD brings about alternative patterns of movement and affectivity, resulting in both the CD and CD player acting in new, unpredictable ways. Tone has rejected the notion that such musical processes mark an interest in the sound of technological destruction. Instead, Tone understands his work as adding ‘an important function to the ways we use machines – producing errors’ (Kaneda and Tone 2014). In other words, in modifying the surface of the CD, Tone was not aiming to destroy the medium – its diminishment of power and functionality. Rather, the aim was to get the medium to do something new, to develop an alternative capacity or function. Just as the pristine and severely scratched CD are distinct from one another in terms of what they can do – the ways in which they function in relation to the playback system and the sounds that they subsequently generate – Tone’s modified CDs are also distinct in terms of what they can do. Tone’s prepared discs work by disrupting the communication process between the CD and the playback device. The scotch tape was carefully placed where the laser hit the disc surface, resulting in a modified reading of the digital signal. As Tone remarks: The scotch tape enables me to make burst errors without significantly affecting the system or stopping the machine. The error-correcting software constantly interpolates between individual bits of misread information, but if adjacent bits are misread, a burst error occurs and the software mutes the output. If a significant number of bursts occur in one frame, the error increases until it eventually overrides the system. (Marclay and Tone 2006: 342) Modifying the CD disc surface causes the CD system to behave in peculiar manner: ‘it cannot decide what to do’ (Marclay and Tone 2006: 342). At

EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC AND WHAT A BODY CAN DO

163

times, this causes the disc to hesitate and search for the signal. In such instances, Tone intervenes: ‘When the CD player stops or hesitates to advance, I tap it or slightly shake it. This very tiny movement affects the machine’s behaviour – maybe changing the focal distance of the laser beam – and it recovers from malfunctioning’ (Marclay and Tone 2006: 342). Overriding the error-correction system and distorting the disc information not only produces various sounds, such as the familiar glitch, click and stutter of the scratched CD. It also disrupts the CD player’s control function, so that the progression of the CD data is unpredictable. Both the sound and playback order are thus affected by the interruption of the CD surface. However, as Kelly (2009) notes, there is an irony to Tone’s wounded CDs, in that getting the disc to skip is a very delicate operation. The marks on the disc surface have to be placed in precise positions, or error correction will ‘catch’ the modified data or simply fail to play at all. Tone’s experiments with the CD, his interrogation of what the CD can do, sought to evade both the CD system’s ‘normal’ functioning, that is, the usual, repeated affective cycles of CD and playback system, and system failure, with which the CD is rendered unaffective, unaffected and unplayable. Tone’s first release involving modified CDs was the 1986 Music for 2 CD Players, for which he used what he identified as famous music, ‘so you recognized parts of Beethoven and Tchaikovsky tunes but very much distorted’ (Buck 2011). This was followed in 1997 with the recorded release Solo for Wounded CD, a studio version of Tone’s 1995 performance of Musica Iconologos (1993).5 Tone had wanted to perform Musica Iconologos live, without simply replaying what already existed on the disc. In order to do this, Tone prepared the CD of the piece using his scotch tape technique. The transmission of information between medium, machine and output was disrupted, causing the disc to indeterminately stutter, jam and glitch; and ‘remixing’ Musica Iconologos in the process. The resultant piece alternates between bursts and passages of rhythmic and discordant digital sound; glitches and squeaks; and sudden silences. Tone refers to his practice of modifying CDs in terms of ‘de-control’. Contra notions of technological mastery, control and precision, Tone understands digital reproduction as ultimately unpredictable (Marclay and Tone 2006: 256). While Tone’s process of ‘wounding’ CD discs is precise, once modified, the effects the disc may have in terms of both the functioning of the machine and its sonic output is for the most part unknown. The

Tone’s compositional process for Musica Iconologos involved translating the characters of two Chinese poems – ‘Jiao Liao Fruits’ and ‘Solar Eclipse’ in October’ into sound. Tone chose images that he considered to represent the characters of the poems’ script. These were then translated using an ‘optical music recognition’ program. For more on this, see LaBelle (2006). 5

164

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

‘wounded’ CDs thus transform a technology designed to re-produce a recording with near perfection and minimal errors into a highly entropic system. As Tone remarks, in this sense, the piece cannot be understood simply as the sonic realization of the composer’s idea; rather, Tone states: ‘the sound I generate does not come from my conscious mind or a projection of my mind. I do not know what will come out beforehand’ (Davies and Tone 2008: 14). Tone’s remark – particularly his emphasis on not knowing what will happen in advance – has some resonances with Spinoza’s mindbody parallelism, insofar as the composer’s idea of a sonic event do not precede or determine the outcome. Rather, the material, i.e. the CD medium and the material-informational exchange between CD and CD player have a degree of autonomy from the ideas and actions of the composer. This is not to suggest that each performance using wounded CDs is entirely unpredictable nor that each performance will be accompanied by the production of new knowledge about what the CD system can do. Tone’s performances are partly informed by what is already known about what the CD system can do – the ways in which it might function and the sounds that it might generate. This prior knowledge comes from various sources, including manufacturer instructions, i.e. how the CD system ‘should’ be used, and previous experiments and performances. Indeed, experimentation as it is understood here can more generally be thought of as a continual movement between the known and the unknown; what is already known about what a body can do, and the exploration of what a body might do. As with Lucier’s Music on a Long Thin Wire, then, Tone’s practice involving ‘wounded’ CDs departs significantly from the notion of the master-composer controlling and manipulating an inert, material and passive ‘thing’. Rather, the CD medium is viewed as having some kind of creative capacity or ‘liveliness’, in that it partly generates what is heard in playback and performance. Such a view is complemented by the Spinozan emphasis on material bodies and their transformative relations. While Tone engineers the conditions of the performative situation in which the medium acts, it is viewed as having an affective capacity in and of itself. This affective capacity is, in turn, determined by a broader network of relations, including the material-informational exchange between CD and CD playback system; and Tone’s movement of the CD player. These relations are what generate the sonic event.

Conclusion: Experimental music, relationality and materiality In this chapter I have considered some of the ways in which Deleuze’s ‘appropriation’ of Spinoza’s philosophy of affects and the perpetual question of ‘what can a body do?’ can be used to explore experimental music praxis. Experimental music’s focus on process, relationality and materiality is

EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC AND WHAT A BODY CAN DO

165

complemented by a (neo)materialist, Spinozan approach. I have suggested that this approach corresponds with Christoph Cox’s call for a sonic materialism appropriate for the sonic arts. However, it is important to note that a Spinozan sonic materialism is not simply a replacement for discursive, hermeneutic and semiotic modes of musicological analysis. Different musical practices require different analytic modes: where experimental music (as it has been defined here) often evades signification and instead foregrounds the materialist, affective dimensions of the musical, there are other genres that lend themselves more readily to questions about meaning and signification. That said, a Spinozan sonic materialism can be understood as asking a different set of questions to hermeneutic and discursive modes of analysis. Consequently, a materialist approach focused on affects, forces and bodies can be used alongside approaches focused on meaning, discourse and signification. Nor does this approach render obsolete political questions regarding whose experimentations are considered valid or invalid (Rodgers, 2011). A Spinozan sonic materialism is thus best understood as a methodological supplement rather than a corrective. I have proposed that a Spinozan approach is useful insofar as it facilitates moves beyond a distinction between active musicking subjects and passive musical objects: a dualism that often implicitly or explicitly informs much musicological thought.6 Spinoza’s monistic ontology and nonanthropocentric conceptualization of the body does not take the human body-as-subject to be exceptional. The human body is not ontologically distinct – it is only differentiated from other bodies (including non-human and inorganic bodies) by its dynamic and affective capacities. A Spinozan approach thus facilitates consideration of the connections between the ‘human’ and ‘non-human’, ‘organic’ and ‘inorganic’ without focusing on the former or latter exclusively: it enables an understanding of the complex, affective relations that occur across and among performing human bodies, media technologies, instruments and environments. Such relations are integral to all musical practice, not just the examples considered here. However, as has been shown, experimental music often foregrounds and amplifies the  generative potential of the material and the affectivity  of the non-human. Experimental music, as it has been presented here, is exploratory: it can be understood to explore the audio-affective capacities of various sound-making bodies. By moving between what a sound-making body can do and what a sound-making body might do; the known and the not-yet-known, experimental music can open up new worlds of sound and vibration.

Small’s process of musicking, for example, is only understood in relation to the activities of the human. While Small is eager to broaden the focus of music studies to include the ‘doing’ of the listener, the worker and the amateur, he does not consider the possibility of non-human musicking. 6

166

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

References Internet sources Boursier-Mougenot, C. (2014), ‘Freeport: [No 007] Céleste Boursier-Mougenot’, YouTube. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn93J2axD_k& feature=youtu.be (accessed 10 October 2014). Buck, C. (2011), ‘Yasunao Tone: Random Tone Bursts’, The Wire. Available online: http://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/interviews/yasunao-tone_random-tone -bursts (accessed 20 January 2012). Burnett, J. (2013), ‘Okkyung Lee: Ghil’, The Quietus. Available online: http://thequietus.com/articles/12728-okkyung-lee-ghil-review (accessed 3 March 2015). Kaneda, M and Y. Tone (2014), ‘Sound Is Merely a Result: Interview with Yasunao Tone, 2’, Post: Notes on Contemporary Art Around the Globe. Available online: http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/476-sound-is-merely-a-result-interview -with-tone-yasunao-2 (accessed 15 October 2014). Lucier, A. (1992), ‘Music on a Long Thin Wire: Album Notes’, Lovely Music. Available online: http://www.lovely.com/albumnotes/notes1011.html (accessed 4 October 2010). Segal, D. (2008), ‘Fantastic Fragments: Lucky Dragons’ Miniaturized Electronic Exotica’, The Stranger. Available online: http://www.thestranger.com/seattle /Content?oid=770495 (accessed 10 October 2014). Thomas, N. (2013), ‘Okkyung Lee: Interview’, Fluid Radio. Available online: http:// www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2013/09/okkyung-lee/ (accessed 14 October 2014).

Literature Benitez, J. (1978), ‘Avant-garde or Experimental: Classifying Contemporary Music’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 9 (1): 53–77. Brett, P., G. Thomas and E. Wood, eds (1994), Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, London: Routledge. Cimini, A. (2012), ‘The Secret History of Musical Spinozism’, in B. Lord (ed.), Spinoza Beyond Philosophy, 87–108, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cox, C. (2011), ‘Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism’, Journal of Visual Culture, 10 (2): 145–161. Cox, C. and D. Warner (2006), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, London: Continuum. Davies, J. and Y. Tone (2008), ‘Yasunao Tone Interviewed by Jared Davies’, Un Magazine, 2 (2): 12–15. Deleuze, G. (1988), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley, San Francisco, CA: City Light Books. Deleuze, G. (1992), Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. M. Joughin, New York: Zone Books. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (2010), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, London and New York: Continuum.

EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC AND WHAT A BODY CAN DO

167

DeMarinis, P. (2011), ‘Erased Dots and Rotten Dashes: Or How to Wire Your Head for a Preservation’, in E. Huhtamo and J. Parikka (eds), Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications and Implications, 211–238, California: University of California Press. Demers, J. (2010), Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press. DiNora, T. (2000), Music in Everyday Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dolphijn, R. and I. van der Tuin (2012), New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, Ann Arbour: Open Humanities Press. Evens, A. (2005), Sound Ideas: Music, Machines, and Experience, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kelly, C. (2009), Cracked Media: The Sound of Malfunction, Cambridge: MIT Press. LaBelle, B. (2006), Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art, London and New York: Continuum. Lee, O. (2008), I Saw the Ghost of the Unknown Soul and It Said … Ecstatic Peace: E#92b. Marclay, C. and Y. Tone (2006), ‘Record, CD, Analogue, Digital’, in C. Cox and D. Warner (eds), Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Musics, 341–347, London: Continuum. Massumi, B. (2010), ‘Translator’s Foreword: Pleasures of Philosophy’, in G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, ix–xxi, London and New York: Continuum. Nyman, M. (1999), Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rodgers, T. (2010), Pink Noises: Women on Electronic Music and Sound, Durham: Duke University Press. Small, C. (1998), Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Spinoza, B. (1996), Ethics, trans. E. Curley, London: Penguin Books. Tone, Y. (1997), Solo for Wounded CD, Tzadik: TZ 7212.

8 Learning to Listen – Inorganization of the Ear Janne Vanhanen

Certainly music traverses our bodies in profound ways, putting an ear in the stomach, in the lungs, and so on. gilles deleuze

The above quotation appears in philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s monograph on the British painter Francis Bacon, in a chapter discussing the ‘hysteria’ of painting (Deleuze 2003: 54). By hysteria, Deleuze indicates the presence of the body on the surface of the painting – a material presence that is immediately visible. In order to make the body appear, the artist must enter into a struggle with the figurative function that has been bestowed upon painting. The question is not of representing the (human) body on the canvas – something that is expected on the basis of the long history of figurative painting and photography – but of creating a sensation, a prerepresentational relation between the body and outside forces (34). To be precise, sensation denotes affect, a transmission of intensity, upon which a relationship between two things (such as a subject and an object) can be formed. What can be said about the relational, pre-subjective body? Deleuze, in his own works and in those co-authored with Félix Guattari, calls it the Body without Organs – an affective body underlying the body that has been organized into an organism as a system of organs or a representation of what the body essentially is. The Body without Organs indicates a body

170

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

understood not as a self-enclosed unity, but rather a site that brings together heterogeneous elements out of which subjective perspective can emerge and renew itself by forming new relations. For Deleuze, this inorganized, intensive body can find its expression in works of art where the struggle against representation is able to reveal pure presence, as in the paintings of Francis Bacon. Can music be hysteric in a similar way to painting? Yes and no: according to Deleuze each art form has its own particular manner of deforming representation. ‘Painting, in short, discovers the material reality of bodies’ and thus expresses hysterically the presence of the body (2003: 55). Music, however, occupies a different position as it ‘strips bodies … of the materiality of their presence: it disembodies bodies’ (54, original emphasis) in a schizophrenic fashion. Yet, what is common to both painting and music – as well as to all forms of art – is their orientation toward demonstrating an intensive, pre-subjective reality that can be nominated as the Body without Organs. Deleuze’s conception of a sonorous body of music can be interpreted as differing from the material body of painting in the following way: while the material body always continues to struggle with its materiality, trying to deform itself into a new configuration, the sonorous body of music establishes a resonance between different elements, which are more or less material (2003: 55). The sonorous body locates the ear all over the physical body of the listener, as is stated in the quotation opening this chapter (54). In my interpretation, this concept can be understood in the concrete manner of feeling sound as pressure – the act of hearing is multisensory. But a sonorous body also extends to the vibratory space between solid entities that become bound together in the phenomenon of sound, forming a synthetic body defined by the relations of its parts. This refers to what Deleuze calls the ‘inorganic life’ of matter: the potential to construct and reconstruct relations networks between organic and inorganic elements, between which there is no ‘great line of difference’ (1993: 104). It is at the limit, on the membrane, in zones of indiscernibility where an organism touches upon inorganic forces outside itself and forms a new assemblage of relations. Consider sound – exactly where is it located? In the banging drum or in the eardrum of the listener? Sound is necessarily spatial and temporal, as well as membranal, since it emerges as a relation between a vibrating source, a vibrating medium and the reception of this vibration – all of these form a sonorous body of the sound-event, a sonic space-time. In the following, I would like to pose the question of what the significance of listening, as creating a sonorous body, is to Deleuzian philosophy. This question becomes evident from the perspective of experimental music which I take as activity taking place (primarily) in the auditory realm that emphasizes indeterminacy, improvisation or process, materiality of the sonic

LEARNING TO LISTEN – INORGANIZATION OF THE EAR

171

medium and uniqueness of the musical moment.1 This activity incorporates searching and learning new ways of listening and forming sonorous bodies. Experimentalism can be contrasted with the established Western art music tradition that is based on pre-formulated compositions created by the author-figure of the composer who also acts as a guarantee of the identity of the composition – a Romantic-Modernist model that Deleuze and Guattari in their writings on music still adhere to, despite their emphasis on experimentation. In particular, I locate the question of listening in the American post-war cultural milieu of experimentalism, of which the works of composers such as John Cage (1912–1992) and Pauline Oliveros (b. 1932) are emblematic. My method is to bring together the writings of Deleuze and Guattari and the ideas and praxis of experimental music in order to discover how the concept of a sonorous Body without Organs might be used as a result.

Expanded listening Experimental music can be considered as expanding the position of the listener; listening is not only demanded from the audience but also from the composer and performer – if it is possible to maintain such clear-cut categories. This model of expanded listening questions both the object and the practice, the what and the how of listening. The orientation is toward experimentation, preparing and trying out different auditory situations. Can you listen to an idea? To a process unfolding? To sound as pure vibration? These questions try to open ways of constructing what I nominate as the Inorganized Ear, a sonorous Body without Organs, a situation where experience is not essentially categorized or organized but is encountered as a flow of intensities between bodies, organic and inorganic, out of which the experience of listening emerges.

The term ‘experimental music’ has been controversial, as its definition is often made ex post facto, by taking certain group of composers and practices as a given core of the category. A study by musicologist Benjamin Piekut applies a critical view to such categorization of experimental music. Piekut uses philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory to highlight the fact that categories are produced and maintained rather than natural and that categories should be thought as networks of heterogeneous actants. ‘A network model is useful because it stresses heterogeneity – networks are never simply language, never simply sound, never simply personal contacts, never simply practices and institutions, but rather a messy mix of all types of things’ (Piekut 2011: 15, original emphases). My understanding of experimental music is informed by Piekut’s claim that ‘[t]he fundamental ontological shift that marks experimentalism as an achievement is that from representationalism to performativity’ (7), i.e. that experimental music as a category cannot be represented by any number of people but must be continuously performed into existence by various actants. 1

172

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Such a relational model accounts for the emergence of an experiencing subject as a temporal, synthetic process, which is able to change its habits, i.e. its pre-given forms of experience, by seeking relations outside its habitual sphere of existence. Deleuze forges a strong link between thinking, learning and experimentation as activities that are motivated by a problem which remains obscure. The true problem is not a choice between preformed alternatives or propositions, but rather a matter of formation of thought itself, which is concerned with an ‘extra-propositional or subrepresentative’ sense and sensation (1994: 192).2 It can be argued that acts of sonic experimentation and learning strive toward finding new problems that have remained obscure. Even though John Cage’s experimentation with indeterminacy and chance operations has today been canonized in the repertory of twentiethcentury art music, his orientation goes against the grain of such a canon of works in the sense that he foregrounds music as a verb, event or process – as a tangle of relations – a few decades before musicologist Christopher Small launched his concept of musicking.3 For both, acquiring a sense of the importance of listening as an open relation toward the world requires a rearrangement of habitual positions. As subjectivity itself is a habitual construct, unlearning habits necessitates a pedagogical path beyond the given, and beyond the habitual. Composer and scholar Christian Asplund (1997) sees a link between Cage and Deleuze and Guattari in their mutual avoidance of relying on habitual responses to stimuli. In his interpretation ‘Cage wanted to open the mind up to the continuous stream of things that passes through our mind and through the world around us’ by introducing novel methods of composition and new situations of producing and receiving sound (6). By highlighting the qualitative sonorous aspect of a sound-event, rather than the formal structure of a work, musical experimentation can become a connective, resonant medium, which is able to reconfigure our ways of listening. This undoing of habits brings us back to the Body without Organs, as the term seeks to describe the functioning of a body that is not fully determined by the teleology of the organism, i.e. a body as a determined set Eye, for instance, is one organic adaptation or solution to the problem of light (Deleuze 1994: 211). Yet, light, as a certain frequency spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, becomes visible only through this solution, so the form of the solution does not pre-exist its actualization. Solutions could well have been different, such as photosynthesis for plants. 3 In Small’s view the model of music as a work contemplated by a listener, who adopts a passive role of the receiver, should be discarded in favor of understanding music as participation, musicking, in various relations formed around musical activity. In short, the central position of a musical work should be replaced with an emphasis on the musical event. As Small summarizes, ‘it seems to me self-evident that the place to start thinking about the meaning of music and its function in human life is not with musical works at all, but with performing and listening’ (1999: 12). 2

LEARNING TO LISTEN – INORGANIZATION OF THE EAR

173

of possibilities for ‘what a body can do’, but rather remains open to a virtual dimension, i.e. it has potential to form new relations, and to organize itself in novel ways. In short, to form a Body without Organs means to experiment, to remain in a state where ‘we do not even know what a body can do’ (Deleuze 1988: 17–18, original emphasis). Openness to ‘experimentation against any kind of interpretation’ is what Deleuze and Guattari also praise Cage for (1987: 267). It is this experimental orientation that art theorist Stephen Zepke (2009) sees as the link between Deleuze and Guattari, Cage’s work and transforming art from objects and works into art as a life-event – as in the ‘Happenings’ of Allan Kaprow, which ‘were events that not only sought to introduce something new into life, but were aimed against the normalised subjectivity of human being itself’ (110). Art not only introduces a novel variation of sensations and concepts but should also question and rearrange the conditions of experience itself. Similarly, Small’s concept of musicking describes in its own way how music and the sonorous realm in general become forces of life that can expand the subjectivity of those who take part in musical activity. This casts new light on the role of the listener in the context of music in general, but especially in the praxis of experimental music, sound art and other such fields engaged with learning to listen differently. It is this pedagogical endeavor I wish to consider alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s thoughts on experimentation and learning.

On hearing and listening To begin with, in order to unearth differences in the auditory realm we need to examine some common notions of what constitutes as listening. The standard definition of listening is something akin to giving one’s attention to a sound, being or becoming aware of the presence of a sound, stream-of-sound, cluster of sounds or soundscape. A generally understood presupposition to this is the ability to hear, that is, the sensory capacity of receiving fluctuations of pressure in a medium through our ears and perceiving this as sound. Keeping in mind Deleuze’s notion of a sonorous Body without Organs, we can extend the model of hearing to multimodal sensibility and include, for instance, the ability to feel the pressure of sound waves by hearing-impaired subjects – a tactile mode of hearing that a ‘normal’ hearing subject also shares, but often overlooks. As philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy notes, in every sensory register a duality of expressions between the existence of the sense as such and its more attentive, even anxious state can be found. The state of simply hearing can be contrasted with the act of listening attentively. Yet, as Nancy claims, in the auditory register these states seem to overlap and mix in a way that brings hearing and listening to a mutual relation with sense (2007: 5).

174

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Sense can here be understood in two ways. First, when we hear something we are always-already grasping a sense of the thing we have heard – we hear something, a bell, footsteps, rain on a tin roof (Nancy 2007: 6). In this sense our perception is bound to so-called natural attitude. This notion refers to the phenomenological understanding of perception, as put forth by philosopher Edmund Husserl (1983), according to which our normal everyday involvement with the world presents a world that is for us, its objects show themselves as laid out for our use, and they ‘are simply there for me, “on hand” ’ (§27, original emphasis). In the sonorous register this would mean that when hearing we already identify sounds according to the wider context of our given environment. Yet, for Nancy, auditory sense goes beyond the ‘present sense’ of hearing. In attentive listening, we want to extract a meaning beyond the immediately given, as in listening to someone speak and comprehending the semantic meaning beyond the concrete sounds of the speaker. But this orientation is also present in acts of listening to something for its own sake, for instance, music, as a sonorous sense ‘where sound and sense mix together and resonate with each other, or through each other’ (2007: 7). The listener starts with the immediate presence of perceived sound. Nevertheless, that sound already starts seeping beyond its immediacy into the realms of sense and signification. Or, one should speak in the plural, as in ‘sounds’, some of which are present to us, some of which remain unnoticed. In other words, the question is also of the background and the foreground, of objects in our perception and that which is left unperceived, unconscious and deemed non-existent. Does silence denote this nonexistence of sound? If we assume that the Husserlian claim of natural attitude and corresponding intentionality of perception is correct, it would seem that we necessarily shut a vast field of sensory agitation out of our consciousness and relegate it to the position of forming the silent background of the world. As a very concrete example, the infrasonic and ultrasonic realm of auditory excitation – what artist and sound researcher Steve Goodman names as ‘unsound’ or ‘inaudible audio’ – remains beyond our sensory capacity to hear and nevertheless has physical and psychological effects on us (2010: 194). The duality between passive, mostly unconscious hearing and the signifying objects of active listening is echoed by philosopher Roland Barthes, who states that ‘[h]earing is a physiological phenomenon; listening is a psychological act’ (1986: 245, original emphases). In light of this, let us consider a citation from John Cage. ‘Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death’ (1961: 8). The first sentence of this statement would seem to confirm the subjective sense of hearing: in my perception there are sounds, but only until I remain in existence. The implied phenomenological perspective is that the world exists for me and that is the limit of my experience. However, Cage’s first sentence is followed by another statement about sounds: ‘they will continue following my death’.

LEARNING TO LISTEN – INORGANIZATION OF THE EAR

175

In an instant, a conceptual wedge is driven between these two sentences: the first confirms the existence of a subjective perception of the world; the second affirms the non-subjective existence of what Deleuze calls ‘the real’ (1994: 211). The problem with remaining solely within the subject-centered perspective is that it affirms the first, subjective statement but tends to erase the latter, or at least puts it in brackets. How can we approach, in a meaningful way, the fact that sounds will continue despite our subjective existence and our relation to them? Cage enters this discussion from the sphere of experimental art and music, and Deleuze and Guattari from a philosophical context of post-phenomenology. In what, I believe, appears as a shared stance and orientation, they all acknowledge the importance of studying the subjective experience of the world, especially in art, but also the problem of remaining within the subjective position with its intentionality and natural attitude. I want to ask whether Cage and Deleuze can help denaturalize the listener’s attitude toward sound and listening – Cage and his contemporaries by their sound works and the ideas behind them, and Deleuze and Guattari by thinking of a method of giving an account to the real that pre-exists experience from the point of view of human consciousness. How can we listen beyond what we already know?

Silence and the immanent sound plane If the task of denaturalizing habits regarding listening is taken as the goal of post-war experimental music, one particular event illustrates the process in a lucid manner. In 1951, John Cage visited a sound-proofed anechoic chamber at Harvard University. Expecting to find complete silence, he was nevertheless surprised to find himself in the presence of sound – ‘two sounds’, as Cage describes it. One low, one high. ‘I was so surprised that I went to the engineer in charge and said, “There’s something wrong: there are two sounds in that room.” I described them, and he said the high one was my nervous system in operation and the low one was my blood circulating. So I realized that I was making music unintentionally continuously’ (Cage cited in Dickinson 2006: 204). For Cage, this visit made palpable the fact that ‘[t]here is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear’ (Cage 1961: 8). From the perspective of subjective experience, sound and silence would initially appear to be opposite terms. However, in the practice of composing and listening to music the silences between sounds are as important structural parts of the work as the sounds themselves. In philosophical terms, Cage’s realization of the impossibility of silence means becoming aware of the intentionality of experience and an attempt to leave this intentionality behind, therefore, to orient oneself

176

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

toward the real. This anechoic observation of the impossibility of silence seems to form the core of Cage’s insight which led to the composing of his undoubtedly most famous work 4’33”, the score of which instructs the performer to not play her instrument for the titular duration of the piece. Often mistakenly called Silence or talked of as ‘that silent piece’, 4’33” has on many occasions been considered as a dead-end position of the avantgarde’s tendency to manufacture provocations.4 Yet, one can ask what the audience received at the work’s premiere in 1952 – 4’33” of what? Was the composition purely conceptual art, as the interpretation of the work being an avant-garde provocation would suggest – or even a joke intended to test the limits of composition or shake up the context and practice of performance? I would argue that 4’33” is no joke. It is not only a conceptual operation but additionally opens up sensible content. Consider the site of the premiere performance, the Maverick Concert Hall at Woodstock. Situated in a rustic setting, trees encircle the barn-like building that reaches out to its surroundings via open windows and doors (Gann 2010: 1). Rather than being a silent meditation on the concept of performance institution, the occasion of 4’33” must have included all the sounds of a late-August rural environment of upstate New York: the wind in the trees and a variety of birdsong, alongside the sounds of the audience. The theatrical gesture of performance and corresponding lack of played music revealed a soundscape that would normally have been suppressed in concentrating on the musical performance. This enhances Cage’s silent room realization on the omnipresence of sound and the idea of music being a matter of one’s direction of attention. This is tied with the notion of the presence of an unconscious element in our conscious perception. Psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910), whose radical empiricism is an important point of reference for Deleuze, formulated the notion that attention proceeds as a kind of spotlight and has a point of focus, a fringe, and a marginal zone. Attention ‘implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others’ (James 1905: 404). What remains on the fringe, withdrawn from conscious perception is what Deleuze would term as sensation. This out-of-focus liminal zone nevertheless constitutes that which appears as personal experience.

See composer and scholar Kyle Gann’s thorough exposition of the background, context and reception of 4’33” in his No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33” (2010). Gann reports that public reception of the piece in 1950s ranged from bemusement to annoyance, as in the New York Times’ condemnation of the work as ‘hollow, sham, pretentious’, and yet concludes that, after all, 4’33” is perhaps one of the best understood works of twentieth-century avantgarde music because of the debate that has surrounded it (192). 4

LEARNING TO LISTEN – INORGANIZATION OF THE EAR

177

Interestingly, from our sound-centered perspective, to prove this James uses an example that appeals to a soundscape that is present while at the same time goes unnoticed. ‘Our insensibility to habitual noises, etc., whilst awake, proves that we can neglect to attend to that which we nevertheless feel’ (1905: 201). To return to the example of 4’33”, the audience’s perception in a concert situation is habitually focused on the musical performance. Yet, Cage’s staging of none of the expected musical content transforms the listening ear into an Inorganized Ear; as a result of a simple action of reduction, the audience becomes aware of what was earlier only a matter of unconscious sensation. A tangle of relations between the audience member and their surroundings becomes apparent, revealing all the heterogeneous elements of the concert situation as part of a sonorous Body without Organs. Here we have an opening onto an immanent plane of sound – a ‘total sound-space’ in Cage’s terms (1961: 9) – where previous hierarchies of sound are undone. We are constantly immersed in the immanent background noise of the world, which remains unconscious as long as it lies outside our attention. The potential for aesthetic appreciation of our sound-world concerns the direction of attention; the noise is already there, pushing itself into our consciousness in singular instances. ‘Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating’ (Cage 1961: 3). The type of silence Cage discovered in 4’33” is not the radical silence of a void, but a landscape – a soundscape that invites the listener in and opens their perception to sounds previously unheard. In response to the concept of silence, Cage’s maxim is: listen carefully! There is no such thing as silence. Such fundamental heterogeneity found in a supposedly empty space, silence, is advocated by Deleuze and Guattari and they celebrate Cage for deploying an ‘immanent sound plane … which affirms a process against all structure and genesis, a floating time against pulsed time or tempo, experimentation against any kind of interpretation …’ (1987: 267). Immanence is the ontological foundation of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy. Pure immanence is being-as-it-is, not subjected to anything else, and prioritizing it eliminates distinctions based on dualities between higher organizational principles and lower states of realization of these. These distinctions manifest themselves in well-established dualities such as form and matter, mind and body or concept and content. Starting with ontological monism, immanence provides the basis for approaching everything as active production and radical relationality. Therefore, Deleuze and Guattari use the term plane of immanence, as all hierarchical structures are ultimately open to change. In short, they are referring to the plane of Nature, or of composition, in the sense that all actual entities are composed of different relations, ‘speeds and affects’ (1987: 262). The multiplicity of these relations emerges as virtual openness, i.e. pure potentiality, rather than

178

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

the actual here-and-now state of things. To sum up, what for us appear as objects – even sounds as distinct, temporally-framed sound objects – are in a metaphysical sense revealed as processes forming and unforming in a network of relations. As the idea of the virtual concerns becoming, or the continuous process of actualization, i.e. taking form, or of potential, then time rather than space should be a privileged field of consideration. This perspective already places considerable emphasis on the aesthetic sphere of music and the sensory domain of hearing in general. What Deleuze and Guattari hear as the nonpulsed or floating time of music would be a perspective where the actuality of sounds is not subjected to a principle of organization which would exist in a more real sense, and possess more reality. Such a transcendent plane of organization would denote structures regulating the use of sound, such as, for example, rules of composition and harmony. Under this conception, the actual sonic manifestation, the sonority of music, would remain only a realization of a pre-existing form. The expanded listening practices of experimental music dismantle the structures of musical organization and thus, for Deleuze and Guattari, reach the immanent sound plane – sound as it is in itself. Sound and structure coexist; everything we hear appears in some form, yet sound is not subjugated under a necessary structural form but could emerge into perception in ways that we have not experienced before. Hence the gesture of presenting silence in the work 4’33” is not a negative, but rather a positive, affirmative act; what we had maybe considered the silent background of our perception turns out to be full of sound. Further, the mode of listening to 4’33” cannot be structural or functional – that is, the function of the work, which is a type of listening determined by the work. Rather, its reception would be better characterized as ‘distracted’, to borrow a term used by philosopher of music Peter Szendy (2008: 103). Distracted listening is not a negative term for Szendy but rather another modality of listening. It does not seek absolute stillness in order to grasp a musical work’s form in a transparent manner but instead opens up listening to lacunae, breaks and the wandering of attention, from which a wider auditory interpretation of a work might be formed. As such, the (non-)model of distracted listening is in opposition to the idea of the total translucency of a musical work. From this perspective Cage’s work is radically opposed to a transparent, clear presence of form, and indeed allows for a more wandering, open-ended listening that is not determined by the work, which results in an infinity of variations, personal arrangements and singular actualizations of particular spacetimes. I understand this to mean a shift from music as a representation of forms, i.e. a transcendental plane of organization, to the performing of a sound-event, i.e. immanent sound plane – a shift of focus that characterizes experimental music.

LEARNING TO LISTEN – INORGANIZATION OF THE EAR

179

Deeper listening: material presence of sound Composer Pauline Oliveros shares the cultural milieu of post-war NorthAmerican experimental music with Cage. Oliveros has arguably refined the practice of listening even further than Cage with her ethos of Deep Listening which incorporates heightened audial awareness with concrete musical and listening methods.5 Initially experimenting with compositional and material processes of taped and electronic music in the 1960s, she later moved toward acoustic sounds and their interaction with the performance space, as in the sustained-tone reverberation studies performed by her Deep Listening Band. In addition to including its methods in her own work, Oliveros has developed Deep Listening as a practice of pedagogical exploration of the boundaries between voluntary and involuntary listening, and has given lectures and workshops involving sonic meditations, intensive and expanded listening and interactive performing. Scholar and artist Tracy McMullen (2010) distinguishes a difference between Cage and Oliveros in that Cage aims at rarefied, even ascetic discipline and experience whereas Oliveros’s work with sound is concerned with embodiment and awareness of the present situation. Certainly, in comparison, the majority of Cage’s non-intentional works seem to unfold impersonally from an initial conceptual idea and he distances himself from the notion of expression and improvisation while Oliveros’s works are sound-situations with the performer and audience becoming aware of the particularity and singularity of the event. Even with the risk of overgeneralization, one could say that both composers seek to avoid the dominance of intentionality, Cage by conceptual, systemic operations, and Oliveros by emphasizing awareness and intuition within a particular situation. Oliveros’ emphasis on the body in her Deep Listening practice stems from the notion that the brain and body receives and generates a vast amount of experience that remains outside of the conscious mind. ‘The body is continually sensing and recording all of the information that is delivered to the auditory cortex, even though we may not be conscious of this constant activity’ (Oliveros 2005: 18). Despite initial appearance, Oliveros’s talk of the body is not restricted to the phenomenological embodiment of the subject, for whom the world appears as a given. She has an interesting observation from her early adulthood when she received a magnetic tape recorder as a gift: Shortly after receiving my gift in 1953, I placed the microphone of the recorder in the window of my San Francisco apartment and recorded the

As Oliveros (2005) explains the term, ‘Deep coupled with Listening or Deep Listening is learning to expand the perception of sounds to include the whole space/time continuum of sound’ (xviii, original emphases). 5

180

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

sound environment. Little did I realize the extent of the impact that this simple act would have on me. Although I thought I was listening while recording, I was surprised to find sounds on the tape that I had not heard consciously. With this discovery, I gave myself a meditation: ‘Listen to everything all the time and remind yourself when you are not listening.’ (Oliveros 2010: 27) For Oliveros, the practice of listening aims at an expanded consciousness of the embodied life beyond the given auditory. It would appear that one can construct a sonorous Body without Organs with the tape recorder. Experimenting with machinic, non-subjective listening amounts to expanding the boundaries of perception. The tape recorder has no focus of attention and becomes the Inorganized Ear that listens deeply. ‘Deep Listening is listening in every possible way to everything it is possible to hear, no matter what you are doing’ (Oliveros 2000: 37, my emphasis). Starting from this notion, listening may not be restricted to the auditory realm only, since listening can encompass a heightened awareness of one’s connection to the world in every modality of existence. We can listen to musical or other types of sounds, but also our senses and the body, our thinking, situations and dynamics, and so forth. We can widen the span of audition from the subject-centered model of hearing to understanding listening as unearthing a constant process of dynamic relations from which the listening subject emerges as subjective becoming. An example of listening beyond the immediately present is Oliveros’s work Primordial / Lift (1998), a composed improvisation for an instrumental ensemble centered on the drone of a low-frequency oscillator.6 The work is divided into Primordial and Lift sections, with corresponding mandalalike charts of concepts providing guidance for the improvisation of the musicians. The first section of forty-five minutes begins with an inaudible oscillator signal of 7.8 Hz that is present only indirectly as it modulates the sounds of other instruments. Performers are instructed to listen intently for the right moment to perform a selected metaphor, which include the sounds of a cell dividing, a muscle contracting and expanding, blood circulating, and a nerve firing (Oliveros 2011: 164–165). In the first section, the oscillator sine wave signal slowly glides up to 13 Hz and then begins the second stage of thirty minutes. Here the center is a sustained D note which anchors the activities: after exploring the options of this stage, the performers are asked to return to that note. The overall instruction is to ‘[l]isten all over to oneself and to others everywhere in the whole of the universe all the time’. Instructions for individual performers

For Oliveros’ instructions and graphic notation for the performers, see her article ‘Auralizing the Sonosphere’ (2011). 6

LEARNING TO LISTEN – INORGANIZATION OF THE EAR

181

include, for instance, dynamic transformation: ‘When a rhythm is perceived merge with it and then transform it’. Suggested metaphors are not bodily but cosmological at this stage: antigravity, black hole, waves and particles (Oliveros 2011: 165). Instructions to performers provide guidance toward intensive listening. Here both the what and the how of listening are examined – how do I listen to another performer producing an expression of the sound of a cell dividing? How do I respond to that with my own sonic metaphor? How do I relate to the subliminal sound of the sine wave oscillator gradually rising and affecting the sound of my instrument and those of others? What do I hear when I listen to myself and others everywhere in the whole of the universe? As a listener – either as a performer or a member of the audience – how do I relate to the musical activity? Do I listen to the performers’ listenings? In its multimodal aspect, the Deep Listening advocated by Oliveros comes close to what theorists Erin Manning and Brian Massumi (2013) have discussed as the autistic field of experience or relational field. Having an interest in the experiences of subjects diagnosed with autism, Manning and Massumi consider the common notion of autists as indifferent and unable to form relations and turn this view around. Rather than a lack of ability in forming relations, autists’ neurodiversity evidences an abundance of relations in comparison to neurotypical subjects. Whereas normal consciousness is the result of schematic prioritizing of human-to-human relations, being ‘focused on humans to the detriment of other elements in the environment’, Manning and Massumi see autism as being engaged with every aspect of the world equally (74): To experience the texture of the world without discrimination is not indifference. To attend to everything the same way is not an inattention to life. It is to pay equal attention to the full range of life’s texturing complexity, with an entranced and unhierarchised commitment to the way in which the organic and the inorganic, colour, sound, smell, and rhythm, perception and emotion, intensely interweave into the aroundness of a textured world, alive with difference. (Manning and Massumi 2013: 74–75, original emphases) In comparison to Cage and Oliveros, Manning and Massumi’s neurodiverse mode of experiencing the world draws parallels to the ways of listening that seek to steer away from the pre-given musical paradigm of prioritizing typical affordances of auditive information in a musical context – recognizing standard values such as notes, melodies, timbres of instruments, bodily gestures of playing – that appear to us as given when we are listening to music. Listening can move non-schematically and expand beyond the form of the human audition into a wider capacity of the sonorous Body without Organs. As media theorist Friedrich Kittler succinctly puts it, when

182

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

discussing the non-subjective technological listening of recording devices versus human audition, ‘our ears … have been trained immediately to filter voices, words and sounds out of noise’ whereas the machines hear ‘acoustic events as such’ (1999: 23). This non-human audition denotes listening to every sound as noise in a situation where every acoustic event has contingent value – very much akin to the texture of the world felt and sensed without essential hierarchy by neurodiverse perceivers. Such a contingent, machinic mode of listening appeared also as an ideal of musique concrète’s search of objective sound which was experienced acousmatically, that is, by suppressing everyday associations and causal determinations. In his study of film sound, composer and theorist Michel Chion describes the goal of acousmatic listening as considering a ‘sound – verbal, played on an instrument, noises, or whatever – as itself the object to be observed instead of as a vehicle for something else’ (1994: 23). This marks an attempt to suppress the usual figure – ground dualism in human perception and asserts the value of sound’s neurodiverse contingent materiality alongside its signifying dimension in our experience. Experimenting with new technology became a part of this endeavor, both in musique concrète and in American experimental music. Such enterprises were Cage’s use of prepared instruments, radio, recordings and electronics; Oliveros’s tape and electronic works, and use of resonant performance spaces; La Monte Young’s oscillator drones; and Robert Ashley’s feedback work, to give some examples. Arguably, the perspective adopted in ‘cartographical’ or ‘archaeological’ studies of media by theorists such as François J. Bonnet (2016), Wolfgang Ernst (2016) and Jussi Parikka (2012), who focus on technological developments in various media as instruments of epistemological and even ontological change, is highly relevant in the context of non-subjective listening of the Inorganized Ear. The mediaarchaeological perspective acts as a reminder that listening is always-already determined not only by physical and physiological conditions but also by cultural and technological factors.

Reassembling listening: The Inorganized Ear I nominated the model of expanded listening suggested by experimental music practices as leading toward an Inorganized Ear or the sonorous Body without Organs. My use of the word inorganized should be read in two senses. First, as disorganization of the neurotypical modes of perception, as described by Manning and Massumi in their account of neurodiversity. Second, as referring to the inorganic life theorized by Deleuze and Guattari. Both of these senses are present in the concept of the Inorganized Ear, as it denotes both intensive connections reaching outside a particular

LEARNING TO LISTEN – INORGANIZATION OF THE EAR

183

organic unity, i.e. disorganization of the organism, and the intensity of the connections arising from outside organic life, i.e. becoming-inorganic of life. This reference to inorganic life might sound puzzling. Our everyday conception of life is based on the model of a growing, developing and reproducing organism – conditions that are distinct from inorganic matter that lacks the spark of life. However, Deleuze and Guattari turn this thought around: ‘[i]f everything is alive, it is not because everything is organic or organized, but, on the contrary, because the organism is a diversion of life. In short, the life in question is inorganic, germinal, and intensive, a powerful life without organs, a Body that is all the more alive for having no organs, everything that passes between organisms’ (1987: 499, original emphasis). According to this view, life is understood generally as a transmission of intensities, with organic life being a particular form of life that has stratified its flow of intensities into the relatively closed circuit of an organism. Inorganic life denotes the passing of pure intensity as pure difference. Stratification is difference as repetition of the same. In subjective perception this can be viewed as habituation; we can have a particular, singular experience that possesses distinct quality which can be equaled with pure difference. On the basis of this experience repeating, we form expectations of continuity. Thus, repetition of difference is turned into repetition of the same. Deleuze calls this process passive synthesis or contraction (1994: 70). This synthesis does not occur only on the level of experiences, but also forms the core of the continuity of any organism; passive synthesis of time contracts instants into a continuum of time, a habit. ‘We are all contemplations [i.e. syntheses of different elements], and therefore habits. I is a habit’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994: 105, original emphasis). The genetic element of our lived experience, the passive synthesis of subjectivity, is determined by the bodily dimension of spatiotemporal complexes rather than by the conceptual order imposed by a transcendent subject. It is our body, rather than our mental structure, that provides the ground for experience. Sensation is unconscious but not indifferent to us. Minute perceptions are energetic, like ‘little springs or bursts of force’ (Deleuze 1993: 130) that add up until they push themselves through the threshold of perception into consciousness. Life, at its most elemental, is the contraction of excitation on a material surface. Life contemplates, not in a psychological or spiritual sense, but as a sensitive plate, preserving and connecting singular instants to form a continuum that appears to the consciousness as a living present, the flow of time (Deleuze 1994: 70). Does this not sound a lot like listening? Yet, habit is not an object of criticism for Deleuze and Guattari, as it has two parallel tendencies: sustaining and expanding. Repetition forms habit, but it can do this only on the basis of fundamental plurality: experience

184

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

continues, passive synthesis brings together new contractions and forms new relations between different bodies. The result is that new habits emerge to modify or overthrow earlier ones. Deleuze and Guattari use the terminology of deterritorialization, which could be called the breaking of habits, and reterritorialization, the formation of habits, in a dynamic sense; expansion is followed by stabilization and vice versa. In auditory experience, we might sense this dynamic in the oscillation between habitual hearing on one hand, and listening as extracting new sense out of our sonic surroundings on the other. But how can we learn this, and how can we reach beyond our own givenness? Philosopher Isabelle Stengers ties the Deleuzian conception of pedagogy to pragmatics and to experimentation (2005: 162). Experimentation means becoming aware of the genetic processes that produce our experiences. Nothing exists as completely isolated and nothing appears without preceding metastable state of tension, but this metastability becomes stratified into a stable habitual state; things, individuals, customs and institutions take shape and assume form. Learning encompasses the formation of these habits, acquiring practical understanding of habits that also enables a critique of them, and the nurturing of new kinds of habits, which opens up the possibilities to feel and conceptualize the world in a different fashion. In short, to learn is to experiment. This is a most relevant point of view when thinking about the meaning and possible importance of experimental music.

Questions and conclusions If experimental musical and listening practices can gain theoretical reinforcement from Deleuze and Guattari’s work, can this take place the other way around? Can our reading of Deleuze and Guattari be enhanced with an understanding of experimentalism in music? Despite them devoting considerable thought to various ways to construct a Body without Organs, Deleuze and Guattari’s model of music is nevertheless highly centered on the musical work as the locus of possible transformative events. The roles of reception and listening are not really discussed, except being mentioned in A Thousand Plateaus where the composer has a tactile, close-range hearing toward her work, but ‘listeners hear from a distance’ (1987: 493). For Deleuze and Guattari, is there a musical body to construct, to feel, or to touch? As Deleuze wrote in his book on Francis Bacon, music’s difference from painting, for him, is that music seeks to disembody the material body (2003: 54). Even though my reading of that claim emphasizes the possibility of constructing a vibratory, sonorous Body without Organs, it remains problematic whether one could or indeed should elevate music to

LEARNING TO LISTEN – INORGANIZATION OF THE EAR

185

immateriality. This is because such a reduction seems to leave out many potential parts of the assemblage of the Inorganized Ear. Certainly, music does – almost miraculously – construct a seemingly immaterial living entity out of sound and sense, and is able to fill us with a profound range of responses. It does this by using material objects and processes, and by bits and pieces of matter and muscle work. Deleuze and Guattari reproach ‘concerts of noise’ for remaining bound to matter, and  for producing a ‘scramble effacing all sounds’. This is because ‘material that is too rich remains too “territorialised” on noise sources, and on the nature of the objects … (this even applies to Cage’s prepared piano)’ (1987:  343–344). Thus, listening to Cage’s work for prepared piano, we cannot  detach ourselves from the instrument itself. Sound theorist Greg Hainge criticizes  this interpretation of noise as a misunderstanding. Hainge claims  that for Deleuze and Guattari ‘noise arises out of cacophony, the result of coexistence of too many disparate elements or an excessive materiality’ and that they thus fail to recognize the potential for creation that inheres in non-traditional musical practices (2013: 21). Peter Szendy writes about the kind of distracted listening he advocates, ‘[t]o listen without any wandering, without ever letting oneself be distracted by “the noises of life,” is that still listening? Shouldn’t listening welcome some wavering into its heart?’ (2008: 121, original emphasis). I understand this wavering and wandering to also include a material dimension, even an excessive one, contrary to Deleuze and Guattari. With music, we listen, we think, we feel. We get distracted. We have an idea. We want to change the tune or stand up and take a walk, or move our bodies with the sound. Experimental music’s orientation is toward opening up space-times that are material as well as mental, let alone processual – they are aggregates of these factors, constructing a synthetic subject of a sound-event. This event takes the hearing subject outside their organic boundaries into the inorganic life of sound itself. Experimental composing and listening (composing as listening) means learning, the acquisition of new listening habits, and also unlearning, letting go of habitual understanding of the nature of music, the significance of sounds, listening habits and so forth, in order to reassemble listening, to reach out and produce something new.

References Literature Asplund, C. (1997), ‘A Body without Organs: Three Approaches – Cage, Bach, and Messiaen’, Perspectives of New Music, 35 (2): 171–187. Barthes, R. (1986), The Responsibility of Forms – Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. R. Howard, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

186

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Bonnet, F. J. (2016), The Order of Sounds – A Sonorous Archipelago, trans. R. Mackay, Falmouth: Urbanomic. Cage, J. (1961), Silence – Lectures and Writings, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Chion, M. (1994), Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans. C. Gorbman, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (1988), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. R. Hurley, San Francisco, CA: City Lights. Deleuze, G. (1993), The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. T. Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. (1994), Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton, New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. (2003), Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. D. W. Smith, London: Continuum. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1994), What Is Philosophy? trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press. Dickinson, P., ed. (2006), Cage Talk – Dialogues with and about John Cage, Rochester: University of Rochester Press. Ernst, W. (2016), Sonic Time Machines: Explicit Sound, Sirenic Voices, and Implicit Sonicity, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Gann, K. (2010), No Such Thing as Silence: John Cage’s 4’33”, New Haven: Yale University Press. Goodman, S. (2010), Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hainge, G. (2013), Noise Matters: Towards an Ontology of Noise, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Husserl, E. (1983), Ideas pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. James, W. (1905), The Principles of Psychology, New York: Henry Holt & Co. Kittler, F. (1999), Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. G. Winthrop-Young and M. Wutz, Stanford: Stanford University Press. Manning, E. and B. Massumi (2013), ‘Coming Alive in a World of Texture – For Neurodiversity’, in G. Siegmund and S. Hölscher (eds), Dance, Politics & Co-Immunity, Zürich–Berlin: Diaphanes. McMullen, T. (2010), ‘Subject, Object, Improv: John Cage, Pauline Oliveros, and Eastern (Western) Philosophy in Music’, Critical Studies in Improvisation, 6 (2). Available online: http://www.criticalimprov.com/article/view/851/1918#_edn3 (accessed 28 January 2016). Nancy, J.-L. (2007), Listening, trans. C. Mandell, New York: Fordham University Press. Oliveros, P. (2000), ‘Quantum Listening – From Practice to Theory (to Practise Practice)’, Musicworks, 76 (Spring): 37–46. Oliveros, P. (2005), Deep Listening – A Composer’s Sound Practice, Lincoln: iUniverse. Oliveros, P. (2010), Sounding the Margins – Collected Writings 1992–2009, Kingston, NY: Deep Listening Publications.

LEARNING TO LISTEN – INORGANIZATION OF THE EAR

187

Oliveros, P. (2011), ‘Auralizing the Sonosphere’, Journal of Visual Culture, 10 (2): 162–168. Parikka, Jussi (2012), What Is Media Archaeology? London: Polity Press. Piekut, B. (2011), Experimentalism Otherwise: The New York Avant-Garde and Its Limits, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Small, C. (1999), ‘Musicking – The Meanings of Performing and Listening. A Lecture’, Music Education Research, 1 (1): 9–20. Stengers, I. (2005), ‘Deleuze and Guattari’s Last Enigmatic Message’, Angelaki, 10 (2): 151–167. Szendy, P. (2008), Listen – A History of Our Ears, trans. C. Mandell, New York: Fordham University Press. Zepke, S. (2009), ‘Becoming a Citizen of the World: Deleuze between Allan Kaprow and Adrian Piper’, in L. Cull (ed.), Deleuze and Performance, 109–125, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

9 Listening Assemblages: Re-sounding Place and Mapping the Affects of Sound Michelle Duffy

In the late 1970s, political economist Jacques Attali declared in his book Bruits (1977; English translation published in 1992) that ‘music is more than an object of study: it is a way of perceiving the world. A tool of understanding … [language] is incapable of accounting for what is essential in time – the qualitative and the fluid’ (Attali 1992: 4). What he argued is that the way in which we understand music and sound is more than as an aesthetic experience alone. Rather the way we define sound is really an engagement with expressions of power, where sound’s appropriation and control reflects and affirms the socio-political structures of a community. Sound in its guise as music in particular has been understood to somehow reflect or represent a group of people, with the repertoire of different groups maintaining a highly patterned and stable sound profile that serves to identify the social group from which it originates (Frith 1996). In this framework, sound and music are defined in terms of representational practice that serves to locate and identify specific identities. However Attali (1992) directs our attention to the ways in which sound can disturb accepted social orders; that ‘music, like cartography, records the simultaneity of conflicting orders, from which a fluid structure arises, never resolved, never pure’ (45). Attali’s conceptualization of sound and music, therefore, has a wider, political implication: that those not speaking in the harmonic language of the community are a potentially destabilizing influence. In this

190

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

framework, the other musical voice draws attention to its difference and, in doing so, to issues about identity and belonging. In this lie hints of the affective capacity of sound. Yet, this also raises ‘the thorny issue of how to explore and experiment with what music is and how it works as music in the world’ (Wood et al. 2007: 868). Scholars from a range of disciplines have explored the sound world in the hope of determining what sound means while acknowledging the difficulties inherent in ‘chasing shadows in the field when striving to perceive and understand musical meaning’ (Cooley 1997: 3). As social and cultural geographers Nichola Wood, Susan J. Smith and I (2007) suggest, in order for a clearer understanding of the significance of sound and music in our lives, we need to ‘work with a conception of music that emphasizes its being and doing – its non-representational, creative, and evanescent qualities’ (868). This in turn requires us to reconsider our engagement with and through the sonic world. Musicologist Christopher Small (1998: 10) offers a way to do just this when he asks, ‘[w]hat does it mean when this performance (of this work) takes place at this time, in this place, with these participants?’ Small’s notion of musicking as a bodily, emotional and cognitive engagement in the doing and listening of music opens up questions as to what occurs within the reciprocal relationship between sounds, people and places. Moreover acknowledging sound as process means attending to our listening practices. Such musicking resonates with the work of researchers who have begun to explore what human geographer Nigel Thrift (2008) has called nonrepresentational geographies so as to consider the non-cognitive aspects of our world that take up much of our daily, human life – or as others describe it, the ‘not-quite-graspable’ (Vannini 2015: 6). For sound studies, such an approach leads us to consider the entire gamut of aural processes and their impact. Within such a framework musicking is a visceral process, producing a range of responses – emotional, affective, spatial and bodily – that are significant to constituting a sense of being in place. While Small’s concept of musicking is useful to making sense of sound, it nonetheless operates within existing structures of power, as the ways in which sounds are connected within a musical piece are underpinned by the rules of music making. Even so, the emotional and affective responses we have to music and sound are often the primary ways in which we register their impact. Since the late 1990s, there has been a renewed interest in emotion and affect in the humanities and social sciences. While there are differing conceptualizations of these two terms, and often these are further complicated by association with terms such as feeling and sensation, the emotions and affect literatures are not entirely discrete; instead, as geographer Steve Pile (2010) argues, they have a shared ontology in that both emotion and affect are considered mobile, moving between people and things. Even so, emotions are most often recognized as bodily states attributed or possessed by individualized subjects. In this context, emotions

LISTENING ASSEMBL AGES

191

refer to psychological states such as joy, anger, disappointment, which are nonetheless embedded within cultural knowledge and are discursively produced and socially formed (Bondi et  al. 2005; Probyn 2005; Clarke et  al. 2006).1 Within these relational contexts, individuals act as witness to, and to some extent are able to, interpret and give meaning to these bodily expressions of emotion. For psychologists this communicative capacity of emotions is significant to how social relations are structured. Emotions are understood as ‘repertoires of readiness’ that elicit certain responses in others because ‘emotions provide scripts not of words but of ways of relating’ (Oatley and Johnson-Laird 2011: 425, 428). In contrast, affects are conceptualized as non- or pre-cognitive and transpersonal. The range of disciplinary accounts as to how affect operates reflects the differing accounts of what this term means and how it acts in the everyday. Influenced by the work of Deleuze and Guattari, affect operates in the Spinozan sense as the bodily capacity to act and be acted upon. Hence affect is not located in a body, rather it is connected to the body and connects the body to other bodies (Brennan 2004; Atkinson and Duffy 2015). It is a means of ‘drawing out a particular lived relationship with the world – a lived or virtual abstraction – that is contingent on the body but not fully demarcated by it’ (Atkinson and Duffy 2015: 96). The work of Deleuze and Guattari offers a means to make sense of the complex configurations of sound, affect and emotion. For example, they use music as an analogy for the processes involved in living things marking out and making claims to a territory, and in this conceptualization what they call rhythm are the traces of encounters between different worlds, between self and non-self (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). However, of relevance to what will be presented in this chapter is their concept of the assemblage, which they use as a means of identifying a ‘constellation’ of elements that converge at certain spatial and temporal moments (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 406). The assemblage offers a way to understand how sound configures listeners through sound’s specific characteristics. Rhythm, melody, tone and colour elicit bodily, emotional and affective responses that can mediate messages, situations and individual moods and energy levels (DeNora 2000; Anderson 2009; Bissell 2010), but which may occur outside of conscious thought. Moreover, how we listen in and through the body is also already informed by materialities, processes and relations with the human and non-human world. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the assemblage, Human geographer Liz Bondi (2005) offers a detailed discussion of the approaches taken in conceptualizing emotion within three geographic traditions; humanistic, feminist and nonrepresentational geographies. She argues that distinctions made between emotion and affect are ‘unhelpful dualisms’ (445) and it is more productive to conceptualize emotion relationally as well as personally. 1

192

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

this chapter offers the listening-assemblage as a conceptual means for understanding how we make sense of our emotional and affective responses to sound art. The focus of the discussion is on a sound art piece, Images of Home, created by children aged between 10 and 12 who live in one of Australia’s fast-growing peri-urban regions. This sound piece arose from a project funded by the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (or VicHealth), which aimed to offer these children the opportunity to explore meanings of ‘home’ in this rapidly changing environment. An important component of this art work was not just a capturing of the children’s relations with their everyday places but also how these relations may be communicated to others in ways that are authentic to the affective forces felt by these children. This chapter draws on this sound art work in order to explore the ways a focus on the visceral qualities of sound offers important insights into uncovering the emotional and affective processes that constitute place.

Creating Images of Home The Images of Home project was conducted in the township of Officer situated about 50 km southeast of Melbourne, a location with one of Australia’s fastest growing populations. While Officer was once little more than a trucking stop, the main street an uncomplicated stretch of the Princess Highway connecting Melbourne to the entire Gippsland region of Victoria, the township has been transformed into an outer suburb of major housing developments. This development will eventually come to fill what were the open spaces of a rural town, and a change not often welcome by those who have lived here for a number of generations. ‘The good times in Officer are gone when it used to be a quiet country town. Now it’s too urbanised’ (quoted in Lynn and Monani 2010: 17), was how one such resident described it. More specifically, community services in this area are concerned about the emotional and psychological impacts of significant community change brought about by urbanization on young people and children. As a local government report argues, there is an urgent need for improved infrastructure and initiatives that will recognize and assist young people in feeling ‘connected to their community through a sense of belonging and wellbeing’ (Cardinia Shire Council’s ‘Youth Policy and Strategy’ 2007). Working closely with the students and teachers of Officer Primary School, the Images of Home project sought to explore how one group of children felt about these changes. In the design of the project consideration was given to using an approach appropriate to children’s understanding of and communication about their everyday lives. Researchers working in the field of children’s geographies have argued that there is need for participatory, child-centered

LISTENING ASSEMBL AGES

193

research methods and approaches that offer children the opportunity to give voice to their own interpretation of the world, and that acknowledge their differently constituted lived spaces (Lewis and Lindsay 2000; Ansell 2009; Béneker et  al. 2010). One such approach is that of participatory methodologies, which aim to build capacity among research participants, that is, research is conducted with and for research subjects (Blazek and Hranŏvá 2012). Such a framework is an important means to gain access to children’s perspectives of their daily lives where researching with children acknowledges that they are active participants in their communities (Lewis and Lindsay 2000).2 Images of Home was a two-stage project involving, first, the collection of sounds by children and discussions about those sounds, and second, the creation of a sound art piece. Recordings made by the children of in-the-moment sound bites offered a way to gain insight into the children’s perceptions and feelings in response to the places visited. Semi-structured interviews enabled the children to talk freely about the sound and its associations.3 The project’s goal was to understand the possible impact of rapid change on children; however, the notion of home was defined more broadly than simply that of the family’s house. Rather home was understood to be shaped by wider webs of social relationships, including school, sporting clubs and friendship networks (Gorman-Murray and Dowling 2007). A total of twenty children aged between ten and twelve years from Officer Primary School volunteered to participate in the project. During a brainstorming session children were asked to nominate certain everyday spaces they would like to visit as part of this project, and then, working in small groups of between three and four, they digitally recorded the sounds of their choice in those places. Recordings were made at various different locations, and included the local football oval, the participants’ own school grounds, and a park and wetlands area in one of the more established housing estates (see also Merlino and Duffy 2011; Duffy 2016a, forthcoming). The day following the field visits and recordings, a member of the research team sat with each child, listened to the collection of sounds and talked about what had been recorded and why. In the final stage of the project pairs of children worked with the sound designer, Angela Grant, to create sound fragments from the recordings made. The children were encouraged to engage creatively with this recorded material, drawing on the sounds and their own ideas as to how these sounds should be woven together.

For a fuller discussion of participatory approaches used in this project, please refer to Duffy (2016b, forthcoming). 3 This approach draws on that of photo-elicitation (Clark-Ibánez 2004) where the participant is asked to take his/her own photos that are then used as interview stimuli, and have also been used in studies that examine the physiological and health impacts of noise (Hall et al. 2011). 2

194

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

The methodological approach used sought to differentiate between the potential of affect and emotion in processes of children’s place-making. Starting from the premise that emotions are bodily states that can be named and attributed certain meaning, the children were asked to collect sounds that corresponded to their emotional relationships to particular locations within the township of Officer. These emotional relationships were emphasized in the gathering of sound material as the children sought out sounds that they thought should be in a particular place but could not be heard, for example the sounds of cheering at the local football oval or the sounds of birds in trees stripping leaves to make a nest. In seeking out such sounds the children tended to focus on the function of the spaces visited, and while disappointed when these were missing, attempted to recreate what they thought belonged there. Along with the re-creation of the missing sounds, the children also recreated the feelings they associated with past experiences of that place, for example, the excitement generated when cheering on your local football team. In the follow-up interviews the children confirmed the significance of these sounds in their descriptions of strong emotional relationships with these sites, and more specifically the people encountered in these places as well as the usual activities the children undertook there. The children’s responses about the sounds they collected demonstrate how they made sense of their location through a cognitive process that sought to articulate sets of relationships to place and people, and in this we can readily discern human geographer Susan Smith’s (2000) argument that sound brings into form space, people and place. However, this focus on the function of a place tended to close down a fuller engagement with how sound works because the focus is on meaning making rather than as to how sound acts on bodies, in terms of the visceral, emotional, experiential and affective processes that Small (1998) defines as musicking. The second part of the project attempted to address this different way of engaging with sound and involved the creation of the sound art piece, Images of Home. The children were encouraged to work creatively with their recorded material, drawing on the sounds and their own ideas as to how these sounds might be woven together. The final shaping of the sound piece was done by the sound designer, who manipulated the sounds by, for example, adding reverberations and echo effects, as well as overlaying different tracks. These different sound snippets were developed into a final piece of approximately fifteen minutes (the stereophonic version of Images of Home can be listened to at http://angelagrant.net/site/images-of-home/, accessed 26 June 2015). Two public exhibitions were held, one within the local arts center near Officer as well as in Melbourne’s CBD. The final piece used a quadraphonic installation with speakers positioned at the four corners of the listening space, as well as channels positioned above a central seating area. This setup was chosen to give a more enveloping sense of space to the listener and attempted to indicate some of the spatial cues

LISTENING ASSEMBL AGES

195

of the environment as observed by the children and the sound artist. This arrangement of sound was significant to facilitating a sense of movement across space, including the depiction of running sounds from one speaker to another or the movement of a swing from one direction to another. The public exhibitions were an important component of the community arts framework underpinning the project as it was a means for the children’s ideas, responses and re-imaginings of what was happening in their everyday spaces to be presented to a wider audience. The goal in creating this sound piece was to capture the children’s responses to their everyday environment and enable others – those not directly involved in the collection of sounds or who may know little about the location in which these were collected – to gain some sense of the children’s perceptions and engagement with their everyday places. This shifted the project to an exploration of affect, with an exploration as to the capacity inherent in the sound art piece, crafted out of the children’s emotional responses to their home, to move the listener. It is in this part of the project that the concept of the assemblage provides a way into understanding the children’s soundscape not as a representation of place, but rather as an open listening experience that accommodates other individual listeners within the unfolding of the sound art piece. We asked the children to listen to place, to pay attention to the experience of sound, and then to attempt to capture their experience of a place. The initial collection of sounds corresponded to the children’s interpretation of what certain sites mean in concrete, functional ways, asking themselves – perhaps without consciously doing so – how can I capture in sound what this space is for? Even so, in the creation of the art piece something else was captured – the ways in which sound carries affect that may then be captured by listening bodies.

Musicking place and the listening assemblage In designing the Images of Home project, the collection and composition of everyday sounds could have been more closely modelled on the methodology of composer R. Murray Schaefer and others working in the soundscape tradition of recording environmental sounds.4 Yet, Schaefer’s understanding

For example, Schaefer (1969, 1977a) as well as Järviluoma et  al.’s (2009) study, Acoustic Environments in Change, when sound scholars returned to the European villages first examined by members of the World Soundscape Project (published by Schaefer in Five Village Soundscapes 1977b) in order to capture and note any changes, particularly that arising out of the processes of urbanization. Scholars working in this tradition are interested in sound for its capacity to influence and shape our everyday environments, and therefore have focused on the experience of sound in terms of its acoustic characteristics, the context in which sounds are heard and how meaning is interpreted given this context and that of the listener (Truax 2001; Dubois et al. 2006; Davies et al. 2013). 4

196

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

of the soundscape classifies the sonic world as a background to everyday life and activity, thus ignoring the complex and dynamic ways in which humans are connected through sound to both the human and non-human elements of daily life (Kahn 1999; Ansdell 2004; LaBelle 2006; Boyd and Duffy 2012). Sound scholars have started to reconsider sound as something more than simply a background to social life, recognizing that sound alters perception of the world. We are immersed in the sounds of the everyday; that sound ‘leaves a body and enters others; it binds and unhinges, harmonizes and traumatizes; it sends the body moving, the mind dreaming, the air oscillating’ (LaBelle 2006: ix). Such a bodily engagement with sound-specific approaches can assist in rethinking our everyday relationships for, as choreographer Hope Mohr (2007) suggests, ‘by subverting our culturally entrenched reliance on seeing as a way of distancing and differentiating the self from others, we were perhaps more open to entering a relationship with the environment not as detached observers, but as engaged participants’ (108). In the original French, Deleuze and Guattari (1987) used the term agencement rather than assemblage, a significant distinction according to cultural theorist John Phillips (2006), as this indicates that ‘a philosophical concept never operates in isolation but comes to its sense in connection with other senses in specific yet creative and unpredictable ways’ (108). This distinction is important. As cultural geographer JD Dewsbury (2011: 150) proposes, the assemblage ‘is less about what it is then, and more about what it can do, what it can affect and bring about’. It is these questions of what an assemblage can do, affect and bring about that drives the analysis of Images of Home presented here. Assemblage thinking is integral to considering how sound makes sense because of the ways in which the listener is brought into its framework. A focus on the visceral experiences of listening serves to reposition the listener within the ‘actualizing, affective moments of Ideas’ within which problems are configured as the work of ‘creative effort’ (Hasty 2010: 1). This creative effort does not simply come into being through the work of the composer, or in this case, the children and sound designer; rather it is a creative effort of listening that brings together the various elements of the sound art piece along with the listening subject’s own histories, subjectivities, experiences, bodily conditions and so on within the assemblage that becomes Images of Home. It is this arrangement that can help elucidate how affect and emotion constitute place. One way to approach the Images of Home’s affective capacity is to analyze the ways in which the listener is positioned. One important thing to consider is how the listener’s subjectivity is (re)located within these sounds, and this is achieved through a number of elements. First, the listener is accorded a position within this sonic world as sounds move around his/ her listening body. For example, the listener hears the introduction of footsteps and scuffing through gravel and leaves, sounds move past from

LISTENING ASSEMBL AGES

197

one speaker to another as well as moving overhead. In this way each individual listener becomes a focal point of the sound art piece assemblage. Second, the listener is positioned within the sounds in ways that gives the listener a sense of bodily movement within this sonic world. This is achieved through the use of sound fragments positioned around the listener. The different positionings of sound in relation to the listener gives the perception of having a bodily form within the sound piece achieved through the foregrounding, back grounding and middle grounding of these different human and non-human sounds. For example, overheard conversations of the children in the playground or in a classroom are indistinct and the listener experiences a feeling of movement through these different spaces even though the actual listener stands still. Finally there are the emotional and affective elements of the piece that are important for making sense of the children’s perceptions and experiences of their everyday places that are brought together in the composition. For example close to the beginning of the piece is the sound of a swing, moving slowly back and forth, heard through minor tonal relations that suggest a melancholic feeling, one that is heightened by its unhurried walking pace. This melancholic feel is revisited later when we hear the addition of echo to the words of one child reflecting on his choice of sounds, an effect that conjures up memories of other times and places. There are also encounters with different pitches, particularly the lower pitches of cars and trains that have visceral affects in that such sounds are felt in the chest. Some of the sounds very clearly signal an emotion, for example that of joy through laughter. In addition, there are visceral elements to such emotional depictions, for later in the sound piece a group of girls laughing seem to whiz around the listener, and while there are no words, as the focal point for listening we, too, can get caught up within this affective movement. In this way emotion and affect operate as the vehicle for connecting individuals – real and in the virtual world of the sound art piece – to one another and to the environment, as well as connecting the mind and cognition to bodily processes. We can consider the conjunction of listening, emotion and affect as the work of gathering and of making coherent the otherwise cacophonous elements of sound (Chow and Steintrager 2011). The form of compositional practice used in the Images of Home project draws from sounds that are the ‘the background hubbub of life … temporarily drawing our attention to it and away from the background noise’ (Cox 2009: 20). For the children engaged in this project, the activities of gathering and drawing attention to certain sounds enables other listeners to think about how bodily, affective and cognitive responses help in ‘forging body-space relationships’ (Duffy et  al. 2011: 17; see also Boyd and Duffy 2012). Attending to sound and listening practices can help to move beyond, beneath or behind representational and discursive registers of thought, revealing more of the unconscious or pre-conscious affective aspects of everyday life. For,

198

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

as Small (1998: 10) invites us to consider, ‘[w]hat does it mean when this performance (of this work) takes place at this time, in this place, with these participants?’ Images of Home requires its participants to more carefully attend to sound, whether that is the children who created the sound art piece with the guidance of the sound designer, or the audience members who later engage with the completed creative work. While the forms of engagement differ, they nonetheless offer a different perception of what we may otherwise only hear consciously or unconsciously as background noise, what philosopher Gottfried Leibniz referred to as the auditory unconscious because of the ways they become connected through the sound art (Cox 2009). We are immersed in sound yet many of the sounds in which we find ourselves may not be registered consciously. Nonetheless these sounds may have powerful unconscious affects, and therefore cannot be dismissed as meaningless noise. Rethinking the sonic world in terms of Leibniz’s petites perceptions, philosopher Christoph Cox argues that we engage in both conscious and unconscious perceptions of sound, and that ‘each of our conscious perceptions is grounded in a vast swarm of elements that do not reach conscious thought’ (2009: 21). While in our everyday lives we may be unaware of this virtuality, we may encounter a sound or sounds that trigger access and draws our attention. This is fundamental to understanding the nature of sound, for, as Cox points out, it ‘renders … not the world of objects and things that are composed’ (Cox 2011: 150) but rather ‘makes audible the dynamic, differential, discordant flux of becoming’ (153). The recordings and creative piece prepared by the children help to draw attention to this unconscious sonic background, since the acts of connecting these sounds ‘register the messy, a signifying noise of the world’ (Cox 2011: 154). However, it is not simply that our bodies resonate with the sonic elements presented to us, but that our different perceptions of these sonic elements arising out of our differing individual subjectivities directly affects the ways in which we inhabit our everyday places. It is these affective processes that were made present in the Images of Home project.

Conclusion Elsewhere I have discussed the importance of affective states in constituting place, that there is something significant about ‘the physicality of the body and its actions with (and within) affective states’ that go into the constitution of place ‘through dynamic human and nonhuman relations’ (Duffy 2012: 130). The qualities of sound – rhythm, tempo, timbre and so on – not only are caught by and inhabit bodies but also that body has a capacity to sense these qualities which then enables a subject to inhabit space (Deleuze and Guattari 1987). This is about more than elemental survival skills or the ability

LISTENING ASSEMBL AGES

199

to communicate, as important as these are (Novak and Sakakeeny 2015). How individuals listen to sound is significant to accessing emotional and bodily responses, the non-cognitive ways subjects engage with each other and the world. The sound art created for Images of Home focused on how relations between the body, affective states and sound mediates affect and is significant to the constitution of a sense of place. Central to the project was a focus on sound, especially the different ways in which sound is perceived, as it opens up possibilities for better understanding the role played by emotion and affect in place-making. Some of the children in this project connected to place in very immediate and personal ways. They captured sounds that were very specific to the spaces they visited or to their own engagement with it. Other children connected sounds and their affective register to broader categories of social engagement. In the creation of the sound piece, the sounds captured by the children and reworked into a set of sonic gestures achieved more than an archiving of the specific location of Officer. The re-sounding of place by the children and the sound artist brought about a double articulation of affective places (drawing on Massey 1994), a space in which the children negotiated, on a number of levels, their identification with and sense of belonging to this place and how this affects them. What is offered in the sonic re-presentations in Images of Home is a way to contemplate ‘the potential to reconfigure listeners’ relationships to place, to open up new modes of attention and movement, and in so doing to rework places’ (Gallagher 2015: 468). Such a complex of relationships is important for, as composer Pauline Oliveros (2005) suggests, ‘[l]istening affects what is sounding. The relationship is symbiotic. As you listen, the environment is enlivened. This is the listening effect’ (40). Hence a focus on musicking alone can fail to capture the ways in which sound escapes our desire for coherence. Conceptualizing the sound art piece and its listeners in terms of a listening assemblage facilitates an important shift in considering the workings of sound. Rather than a focus on what sounds mean or represent, Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage thinking suggests how we are attentive to the materiality of sound and how it connects and enables exploration of the relations – even if only momentarily – captured within a particular configuration of relations (Swiboda 2004). While the raw, physical elements of sound provide the fundamental material for perceiving the sonic world, the ways in which sound material is composed and then processed by listeners influences its interpretation. Assemblage thinking offers a way to conceptualize the constitution of affective places. This is made possible because of how sound works; the listener is able to encounter and become re/constituted within a process. The children’s mapping of their everyday places was an ‘experimentation in contact with the real’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 12), one that captured the unfolding of their relations in and with place. The listening assemblage

200

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

offers a means to better understand how we engage with sound art work. It is not what participants can tell us about their sound collections that are important, for as Brennan (2004) tells us, feelings are sensations that ‘have found the right words’ (5). It is the affective, bodily and intuitive processes that constitute self and place. A listening assemblage framework allows us to acknowledge that the creative actions of composition gives coherence to sound while simultaneously destabilizing and opening up what meanings may be attributed, and it is this inherent paradox that allows us our varied and multiple entries into the sound world.

Acknowledgments This research was funded by VicHealth (Victorian Health Promotion Foundation) Technology, the Arts and Social Connection (TASC) grant. I thank the children and teachers of Officer Primary School for their participation, researcher Dean Merlino and sound artist Angela Grant for their insightful work and collaboration on this project. I also thank Paul Atkinson for insightful comments and questions on an earlier draft.

References Internet source Images of Home. Available online: http://angelagrant.net/site/images-of-home/ (accessed 26 June 2015).

Literature Anderson, B. (2009), ‘Affective Atmospheres’, Emotion, Space and Society, 2 (2): 77–81. Ansdell, G. (2004), ‘Rethinking Music and Community: Theoretical Perspectives in Support of Community Music Therapy’, in M. Pavlicevic and G. Ansdell (eds), Community Music Therapy, 91–113, London and Philadelphia, PA: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Ansell, N. (2009), ‘Childhood and the Politics of Scale: Descaling Children’s Geographies?’ Progress in Human Geography, 33 (2): 190–209. Atkinson, A. and M. Duffy (2015), ‘The Amplification of Affect: Tension, Intensity and Form in Avant-Garde Painting and Dance’, in J. Taylor (ed.), Modernism and Affect, 94–110, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Attali, J. (1977), Bruits: Essai sur l’économie politique de la musique, Paris: PUF/ Fayard.

LISTENING ASSEMBL AGES

201

Attali, J. (1992), Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Béneker, T., R. Sanders, S. Tani and L. Taylor (2010), ‘Picturing the City: Young People’s Representations of Urban Environments’, Children’s Geographies, 8 (2): 123–140. Bissell, D. (2010), ‘Vibrating Materialities: Mobility–body–technology Relations’, Area, 42 (4): 479–486. Blazek, M. and P. Hranŏvá (2012), ‘Emerging Relationships and Diverse Motivations and Benefits in Participatory Video with Young People’, Children’s Geographies, 10 (2): 151–168. Bondi, L. (2005), ‘Making Connections and Thinking through Emotions: Between Geography and Psychotherapy’, Transactions: Institute of British Geographers, 30 (4): 433–448. Bondi, L., M. Smith and J. Davidson, eds (2005), Emotional Geographies, London: Ashgate. Boyd, C. and M. Duffy (2012), ‘Sonic Geographies of Shifting Bodies’, Interference: A Journal of Audio Culture. Available online: http://www.interferencejournal .com/articles/a-sonic-geography/sonic-geographies-of-shifting-bodies (accessed 4 June 2015). Brennan, T. (2004), The Transmission of Affect, Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press. Cardinia Shire Council (2007), Youth Policy and Strategy 2007–2011. Available online: http://www.cardinia.vic.gov.au/page/HomePage.aspx (accessed 11 March 2010). Chow, R. and J. Steintrager (2011), ‘In Pursuit of the Object of Sound: An Introduction’, Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 22 (2–3): 1–9. Clarke, S., P. Hoggett and S. Thompson (2006), Emotion, Politics and Society, London: Palgrave. Clark-Ibánez, M. (2004), ‘Framing the Social World with Photo-Elicitation Interviews’, American Behavioural Scientist, 47: 1507–1527. Cooley, T. (1997), ‘Casting Shadows in the Field: An Introduction’, in G. Barz and T. Cooley (eds), Shadows in the Field, 3–22, New York, Oxford University Press. Cox, C. (2009), ‘Sound Art and the Sonic Unconscious’, Organised Sound, 14 (1): 19–26. Cox, C. (2011), ‘Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism’, Journal of Visual Culture, 10 (2): 145–161. Davies, W., M. Adams, N. Bruce, R. Cain, A. Carlyle, P. Cusack, D. Hall, K. Humef, A. Irwin, P. Jennings, M. Marselle, C. Plack and J. Poxon (2013), ‘Perception of Soundscapes: An Interdisciplinary Approach’, Applied Acoustics, 74: 224–231. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. DeNora, T. (2000), Music in Everyday Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dewsbury, J. D. (2011), ‘The Deleuze-Guattarian Assemblage: Plastic Habits’, Area, 43 (2): 148–153. Dubois, D., C. Guastavino and M. Raimbault (2006), ‘A Cognitive Approach to Urban Soundscapes: Using Verbal Data to Access Everyday Life Auditory Categories’, Acta Acustica united with Acustica, 92: 86–874.

202

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Duffy, M. (2012), ‘The Requirement of Having a Body’, Geographical Research, 51 (2): 130–136. Duffy, M. (2016a, forthcoming), ‘The Role of Affect and Emotion in Children’s Place-making’, in T. Skelton, K. Nairn and P. Kraftl (eds), Geographies of Children and Young People. Space, Landscape, and Environment, Volume 3, New York: Springer. Duffy, M. (2016b, forthcoming). ‘The Listening ‘I’: Children’s Emotional and Affective Representations of Place’, in A. van Luyn and S. Gair (eds), Sharing Qualitative Research: Showing Lived Experiences and Community Narratives, London and New York: Routledge. Duffy, M., G. Waitt, A. Gorman-Murray and C. Gibson (2011), ‘Bodily Rhythms: Corporeal Capacities to Engage with Festival Spaces’, Emotion, Space and Society, 4 (1): 17–24. Frith, S. (1996), Performing Rites: Evaluating Popular Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gallagher, M. (2015), ‘Sounding Ruins: Reflections on the Production of an “Audio drift” ’, Cultural Geographies, 22 (3): 467–485. Gorman-Murray, A. and R. Dowling (2007), ‘Home’, M/C Journal, 10 (4). Available online: http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/01-editorial.php (accessed 4 June 2015). Hall, D., A. Irwin, M. Edmondson-Jones, S. Phillips and J. Poxon (2011), ‘An Exploratory Evaluation of Perceptual, Psychoacoustic and Acoustical Properties of Urban Soundscapes’, Applied Acoustics, 74 (2): 248–254. Hasty, C. (2010), ‘The Image of Thought and Ideas of Music’, in B. Hulse and N. Nesbitt (eds), Sounding the Virtual: Gillese Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music, 1–22, Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Järviluoma, H., M. Kytö, B. Truax, H. Uimonen and N. Vikman, eds (2009), Acoustic Environments in Change, Series A: Research Papers 13, Tampere: TAMK University of Applied Sciences. Kahn, D. (1999), Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts, Cambridge and Massachusetts: MIT Press. LaBelle, B. (2006), Background Noise: Perspectives On Sound Art, New York: Continuum. Lewis, A. and G. Lindsay, eds (2000), Researching Children’s Perspectives, Philadelphia, PA: Open University Press. Lynn, M. and D. Monani (2010), Building Family and Community Resilience in Cardinia Growth Corridor: A Case Study of Officer, Report prepared for Windermere Child and Family Services. Massey, D. (1994), ‘Double Articulation’, in A. Bammer (ed.), Displacements, 110–121, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Merlino, D. and M. Duffy (2011), ‘Listening for a Change: Sound and Agency at the Urban/Rural Interface’, in J. Cattermole, S. Homan and G. Smith (eds), Instruments of Change International Association for the Study of Popular Music, 71–76, Clayton: Monash University. Mohr, H. (2007), ‘Listening and Moving in the Urban Environment’, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, 17 (2): 185–203. Novak, D. and M. Sakakeeny (2015), ‘Introduction’, in D. Novak and M. Sakakeeny (eds), Keywords in Sound, 1–11, Durham & London: Duke University Press.

LISTENING ASSEMBL AGES

203

Oatley, K. and P. Johnson-Laird (2011), ‘Basic Emotions in Social Relationships, Reasoning, and Psychological Illnesses’, Emotion Review, 3 (4): 424–433. Oliveros, P. (2005), Deep Listening: A Composer’s Sound Practice, Lincoln, NE: iUniverse. Phillips, J. (2006), ‘Agencement/Assemblage’, Theory Culture and Society, 23 (2–3): 108–109. Pile, S. (2010), ‘Emotions and Affect in Recent Human Geography’, Transactions, Institute of British Geographers, 35 (1): 5–20. Probyn, E. (2005), Blush: Faces of Shame, Sydney: UNSW Press. Schaefer, R. M. (1969), The New Soundscape, Canada: Universal Edition. Schaefer, R. M. (1977a), The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World, Rochester, VT: Destiny Books. Schaefer, R. M., ed. (1977b), Five Village Soundscapes, Vancouver, BC: ARC Publications. Small, C. (1998), Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, Hanover: Wesleyan University Press. Smith, S. J. (2000), ‘Performing the (Sound)World’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 18 (5): 615–637. Swiboda, M. (2004), ‘Cosmic Strategies: The Electric Experiments of Miles Davis’, in I. Buchanan and M. Swiboda (eds), Deleuze and Music, 196–216, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Thrift, N. (2008), Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect, London: Routledge. Truax, B. (2001), Acoustic Communication, 2nd edn, Westport, Connecticut and London: Ablex Publishing. Vannini, P. (2015), Non-Representational Research Methodologies: An Introduction’, in P. Vannini (ed.), Non-Representational Methodologies: Re-Envisioning Research, 1–18, New York and London: Routledge. Wood, N., M. Duffy and S. J. Smith (2007), ‘The Art of Doing (Geographies of) Music’, Environment & Planning D: Society & Space, 25 (5): 867–889.

10 Forming Common Notions in a Kinetic Research Collaboration Hanna Väätäinen

Anneli Tiilikainen, a research collaborator and movement improvisation enthusiast who has a visual impairment, and I were exploring how to use movement as an analytical tool in music and dance research. We had been sitting by a table for half an hour reflecting upon the possible paths our collaboration could take, when we started to listen to the room through movement. We observed the forms, colors, temperatures and sounds of the materials in the room. We stroked the wall-to-wall carpet with our palms, spread our arms toward the windows and leaned against the walls with our shoulders. We danced slowly by the large windows from the right to the left corner of the room. We tried out different kinds of postures with our arms in front of the windows. We carefully tapped the window frames and the glass and listened. Our dancing concentrated on the characteristics of the space through the concepts, movements and sounds we had discovered the  previous day. There was a resemblance in the atmosphere between  how we had talked and how we now danced; an investigative dimension was present. We were dancing for a scholarly purpose with both research questions and observation questions in our minds. Through my collaboration with Tiilikainen, I have developed a way of creating concepts by using movement improvisation,1 which is a form of contemporary dance. In this chapter, I aim to introduce this dance

My method of carrying out movement improvisation combines aspects from postmodern dance, new dance, invisible theatre and contact improvisation. 1

206

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

ethnographic method, based on the formation of common notions. The philosopher Moira Gatens (2009) writes that common notions arise when one body encounters another with which it is compatible and so experiences joy. Although such encounters initially arise through chance – and so the cause of joy is external to the body that experiences it – the desire to repeat the joyful experience promotes reflection upon what it is that bodies have in common. If a notion can be formed of what is common between the two then that notion will be an adequate idea. (7) This description of how the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza in the 1660s and 1670s saw common notions bears a resemblance to how some moments during my research process have appeared to me. The formation of Spinoza’s common notions proceeds from encounters, which by chance are in some respect empowering to their parties, to a reflection of the qualities of the bodies involved in these same encounters. Those bodies are more than human bodies. They can consist of the movements of dancers and musicians, sounds, the characteristics of an environment and concepts. A notion of what is common between two bodies can be, in addition to a word, a way of moving or approaching a problem. Spinoza called these common notions adequate ideas. My understanding of common notion is influenced by Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of Spinoza’s Ethics.2 According to Deleuze (1988), ‘the common notions are practical Ideas’ as well as ‘an Art, the art of Ethics itself: organizing good encounters, composing actual relations, forming powers, experimenting’ (119). By common notions, I wish to convey both conceptual and kinetic ideas which increase the abilities of the ethnographer and the participant to collaborate. Common notions are not necessarily words but ways of moving and conceiving in relation to something else: a piece of music, a research subject or a material and social space. Spinoza’s and Deleuze’s understanding of common notions is one where the body and its relationship with motion and rest have a special place compared to other doctrines of common notions.3

Common notion (in Latin notiones communes) is a term which was already used by Euclid and Plutarch and in the seventeenth century by many philosophers, among them René Descartes. Deleuze’s study Spinoza: Philosophie pratique (1981/2003) was originally published in 1970. Spinoza’s Ethics was posthumously published in 1677. 3 For Spinoza adequate ideas are ideas which ‘agree with their objects’ (Spinoza, II/P43 Schol.). Common notions are ‘ideas of the properties of things’ and they belong to a second kind of knowledge. This is followed by a third kind of knowledge, which Spinoza calls intuitive knowledge (Spinoza, II/P40 Schol. 2). I apply Spinoza’s ethical thinking by paying attention to kinetic modes of thinking about what concepts are. A movement idea can have a concept as its object and it can try to agree with it. An adequate mode of thinking can be one which makes visible the commonalities between the creation of movements and the creation of concepts. 2

FORMING COMMON NOTIONS

207

By examining the formation of common notions (Spinoza 1985; Deleuze 1988; Gatens 2009; Lorraine 2011) between bodies, especially dancing bodies, I participate in the elaboration of the thoughts of Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari in the field of dance research (Manning 2007, 2009, 2013; Burt 2009; Hickey-Moody 2009; McCormack 2013). Dance historian Ramsay Burt (2009: 204), for example, thinks that the openness in Yvonne Rainer’s and Xavier Le Roy’s process-oriented dance work ‘resembles the account of affective sociability proposed by … Spinoza’. According to Burt, these artists’ works ‘explore the potential of dancing bodies to generate affects that bring people together’ (204). I move this idea from the field of dance to the field of research by suggesting that ethnographic encounters, which include dancing, have the potential to generate affects that not only bring people together but can increase the capacities of these bodies to affect and be affected. A body in this context can consist of the movements of two dancing women, the room where they dance, the concepts they have just talked about and the music that they want to listen to through movement. This understanding draws from a Spinozan conception of a body that Deleuze (1988) and Deleuze and Guattari (2013) develop. Encounters in which movement is used for analytical purposes also have the potential to make dance scholars and dancers perceive what kinds of relations are common to them. Affective sociability in ethnography means that the ethnographer has trust in the collaborators’ skills of engaging with and expanding many kinds of theories: those that are the collaborators’ own, those that the collaborators are interested in, and those that the researcher first becomes acquainted with when he or she starts working with a collaborator. It also means that philosophical concepts, research questions and methodological discussions can be part of ethnographic encounters and not only academic ones. By using movement as a way of creating common notions, I aim to show how creating concepts through dance with a participant can be an accessible and political way of undertaking research. The creation of concepts can draw from the concrete bodily practices of a visually disabled collaborator and physically disabled researcher. By political I wish to describe a practice which advances the use of movement in ethnographic encounters and builds on the knowledge bodies have regarding research topics. This kind of politics is a way of becoming active; it is a stage in the formation of common notions. Much scholarly research is theoretically difficult and abstract, which tends to exclude many people from the scholarly discussions that concern their bodies. The abstractness of theoretical discussions, however, does not mean that they cannot be made accessible. Deleuze (2007) insists, in his lecture on Spinoza, that common notions are concrete and that they are formed locally. In this chapter, the views of a collaborator form an important part of the argument which is not always the case in dance research, that builds on Deleuze and Guattari’s texts. For example, disability scholar Anna Catherine Hickey-Moody’s (2009) study on integrated dance theatre

208

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

and especially the work of the Australia-based Restless Dance Company focuses on the medical discourses and discourses of social construction of intellectual disability as well as on Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of becoming and affect. In the analysis of the becomings and affects, the point of view of the dancers is missing. Hickey-Moody’s analysis is based on her fieldwork among the company dancers and her material consists of research journals. As a scholar and a performer in the dance company’s major work for 2001, Hickey-Moody states that she ‘discussed theoretical frameworks for thinking the body’ with the director of the work. Deleuze’s views on the body and the concepts of smooth and striated informed ‘the directorial imperative to perform corporeality as maps of life histories and to inscribe these corporeal patterns into space’ (Hickey-Moody 2009: 62). However, she does not specify what the director’s views were. Collaborators’ views are invaluable in the creation of common notions between research and dance. With the help of analytical tools I call kinecepts – a term I have borrowed from physical educator Eleanor Metheny (1965) – it is possible to theorize through using movement in ethnographic encounters. By kinecepts I imply movements that are used as analytical concepts; tools through which a research subject can be analyzed. In addition to being abstract, scholarly knowledge formation can be practical, corporeal, illustrative and, therefore, accessible to many kinds of participants. Metheny defines kinecepts in relation to kinestructs. By the term kinestruct she expresses ‘the general pattern of a movement as a whole’ (93). Instead of perceiving ‘the thousands of changes of muscle tension’ we perceive a kinestruct, the form of a movement which we execute. A kinecept is for Metheny the feeling of this form and of this movement (93–94). However, for me kinecept also refers to a movement or a way of moving which can be linked to concepts and to a research question and which can be used in a scholarly research as an analytical tool; the feeling and the form are inseparable. I ask how common notions are formed by using kinecepts as a tool to increase the accessibility of theoretical knowledge.4 The advantage of bringing kinecepts and common notions together is that the theory of common notions stresses collaboration in the composition of kinecepts. Researchers in the field of disability studies have tried to include disabled people with the help of participatory and artsinformed methodology in the formulation of theoretical knowledge (Rice et al. 2015; Sitter 2015; Block et al. 2016). However, kinecepts have not yet been used in the field of participatory disability research. Philosopher Phil Turetsky (2004) has previously used the concept of the kinecept in the analysis of rhythmic habits from a Deleuzian-Guattarian perspective. He defines kinecept as a habitual gesture that can be found in a bodily practice like dance. He thinks that kinecepts belong ‘to the kinaesthesia of bodies as concepts belong to the formulations of thought and percepts to the organization of sensation’. According to Turetsky, kinecepts ‘can be invented, acquired, and shared, but cannot be reduced to concepts, percepts, or affects (145)’. For me, kinecepts can belong to the formulations of thought as well as to the kinaesthesia. 4

FORMING COMMON NOTIONS

209

I got to know Tiilikainen in 2009 when I contacted disability organizations in Joensuu in order to find people who would be interested in practicing movement improvisation with me. I asked if she would be interested in participating in the analysis of an experimental short film entitled Point, directed by Pirjo Ojala and edited by Tiina Laine. Point is a ten-minute long artistic statement in favor of accessibility of a public space from the point of view of people with different kinds of disabilities. It shows how eleven disabled people reach the second floor in a shopping center. The film underlines barriers in a built environment.5 Tiilikainen and I analyzed the film by using both physical movements and philosophical concepts.6 Our collaboration concentrated on movements and spaces. We became interested in what kinds of movements the film brought about in our bodies and what these and other movements achieved in different kinds of spaces. The film became a stimulator for a process, which concerned the investigation of locations through dance, more specifically common notions between our bodies and a selection of spaces, movements and philosophical concepts. The process resulted in many ideas concerning dancing and research, among them two new concepts. In our encounters, Tiilikainen and I became parts of larger ensembles which consisted of images, sounds, physical movements and materials used in a built environment. Deleuze and Guattari’s (2013: 299–304) conception of the body stresses relations and affects instead of organs, functions or species characteristics. A body consisting of two improvising dancers can be known only by studying how it can or cannot enter into composition with other ensembles consisting, for example, of analytical concepts.

Barrier-thetics and the Splintered Extension as Kinetic Collaborative Theorizing During our first set of encounters we co-created and elaborated ways of moving based on our viewings of Point and discussed them in relation to Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the smooth and the striated. We transported these The music of the film is made in the music workshop of The Lyhty association, a service provider for adults with learning disabilities, and in the Special Music Centre Resonaari, which has a music school for special needs groups in Helsinki. 6 Tiilikainen and I discussed and danced together with a view to co-creating ways of using movement as an analytical tool. In order to create space for Tiilikainen’s thoughts I asked a lot of open questions. I documented the meetings with the help of a video-recorder and by taking notes and writing up observations after every session. Tiilikainen’s participation was more encompassing than that which can be presented in this chapter. The project comes close to collaborative research in ethnography (Fluehr-Lobban 2008; Rappaport 2008) and in dance (Cancienne and Bagley 2008; Löytönen 2011; Dyer and Löytönen 2012) even though the idea of collaborating was mine and even though I have authored this chapter alone. 5

210

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

movements and concepts to two libraries in Joensuu. We chose the places by talking about them and considering different kinds of alternatives. I facilitated the discussions we had by introducing topics and by listening to Tiilikainen’s reactions in order to learn if a theme or a suggestion interested her or not. In the libraries we were interested in finding out what our movements did to the things and sounds in particular places and how the places transformed the movements. I call this kind of ethnographic research kinetic collaborative theorizing. It is based on the supposition that physical movement can be used to develop theoretical ideas and that anyone can participate in this kind of activity. I approach the creation of kinecepts as a method of forming common notions. In our first meeting, for example, we watched Point twice in Tiilikainen’s flat. During the first viewing, we sat on two chairs next to the computer table and mainly moved our hands. During the second viewing, we moved more freely in the flat both in an upright position and in a lying down position on the floor. In the middle of and after the two screenings we discussed the movements we had used and how they could be developed as analytical tools in general and specifically in the study of Point. During the viewings, I followed and imitated Tiilikainen’s movements in order to learn them. During the discussions, I asked her to tell me about one movement or movement quality at a time. We analyzed the five different ways of moving we had used in the viewings. I describe three of them below. The first is a pointed back and forth hand movement used by Tiilikainen, which she described as a nervous and tense reaction to an inaccessible urban environment depicted in the film. The environment was embodied in Tiilikainen through this movement. It was her equivalent of the quality of the place where the dancers in the film found themselves. During a break between the first video recording and the second, Tiilikainen described the movement and the urban space of the film with the word splintered (in Finnish tikkuinen). According to Tiilikainen, the movement could be used to study an unmanageable, uncontrollable environment and a sense of threat or danger. In addition to responding to Point through this movement we studied Tiilikainen’s flat through it. The movement was transformed from distressed and anguished to enquiring and soft; it acquired a new quality. We were, in fact, having a discussion about the music of Point when Tiilikainen stood up and started to dance. I followed her. Toward the end of this dance conversation we listened to the surfaces of both our bodies and of Tiilikainen’s flat by using a tapping movement. The making of an analysis obtained a new aspect; it produced sound. The performance of a conversation about music in the film became a dance, which, in turn, became a performance of both movement and sound.7 Ethnomusicologist Kai Fikentscher makes a distinction between musicking in sound and musicking in movement. By the former he refers to deejaying and by the latter to dancing in underground dance music culture in New York City. According to Fikentscher, a dancing body is a musical instrument. A dancer is ‘a performer in and of the musical event’, a participant in a collective performance of a ritual (2000: 57–61). 7

FORMING COMMON NOTIONS

211

The second movement was an extension of arms combined with a slow turn to the left or right side or bending rearward of the spine. Tiilikainen explained that this movement is a very typical movement for her; it is specific to her dancing when she practices movement improvisation. Tiilikainen felt this movement as a more positive and happy than the first one. She described it as ‘having nothing to worry about’ and as ‘mastering, being in control of the situation’. She said that the movement came from the image of the escalators in the film. The third movement we used was a combination of these two movements. We directed the back and forth movement upward and rearward, and this direction gave the movement a new quality. When we watched the film for the second time by moving more freely in Tiilikainen’s flat we used this combination repeatedly. At the library we talked about the directions our collaboration could take. I asked if there was splinteredness in the library space. I wanted to know how the word could be used and what it could mean in addition to referring to an inaccessible space. Tiilikainen started to move in order to be able to answer that question. The room had large windows leading onto another space, a hall full of workstations for the library users. We danced by these windows. No one noticed us dancing behind the windows. The students were working, so concentrated on their computers. The day after that we went to the city library, where we booked a listening room. We used the back and forth movement to listen to a piece of music which Tiilikainen had the previous day suggested would go with this movement. We used the movements we had discovered when watching Point in both places in order to see what became visible, how the movements were transformed, and how they provided us with a point of motion in these places. I interpret the back and forth movement and the stretch as incipient common notions. The combination which consisted of the back and forth movement and the extension combines a positivity of the stretch with the negativity, curiosity or critical quality of the shaking. It mixes a feeling of being in control, of using one’s own space, with a feeling of distress or curiosity (depending on the quality of the shaking). From the perspective of Spinoza’s and Deleuze’s theory of common notions, it combines joy and sadness. I call a splintered extension this peculiar mix of negativity and positivity expressed in the combination of the two movements. Following philosopher Erin Manning’s ideas about incipient action and the relational movement I advocate the politics of movement which affirms the status of a bodily movement in the creation of analytical concepts and in the analysis of research material. Manning (2009) ‘attempts to create vocabulary for how movement becomes thought and vice-versa’ (8). She writes that relational movement ‘means moving the relation’ between two bodies (30). This idea is elaborated by Milla Tiainen and Jussi Parikka (2013) in their analysis of variation, intermediality and biopolitics in Tero Saarinen's contemporary dance work Hunt. For them, relational movement refers to how a dance

212

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

piece moves the relation between the dancer and their surroundings (211). In my encounter with Tiilikainen, relational movement refers to ways of undertaking research and dancing which can move the relation between movement improvisation and the creation of concepts. Manning uses the concept of incipient action to address two things: a moment which precedes an actual physical movement and a politics of movement. Incipient action is, according to my interpretation, the phase of preparation before precise movements have been executed and a state of potentiality. They are influenced by the pasts and abilities of the bodies, their dynamic relations and the overall situation. The politics of movement means advocating these moments of just-before and of the not-yet where many possibilities are still open (Manning 2009: 14–15, 20 and 27). After we had discovered the two movements and their combination in our first meeting, I asked Tiilikainen: If she were to study Point with the help of some concept, what would that concept be? Tiilikainen had thought about the film not so much conceptually as sensory-motorically. But after thinking for a while she said the words barriers (in Finnish esteet) and aesthetics (in Finnish estetiikka). The Finnish word for barrier sounds and looks like the beginning of the word estetiikka, aesthetics. I heard the two words as a combination and, therefore, suggest the term barrier-thetics to be used together with splintered extension. A barrier-thetics and the splintered extension could be thought of as methods of resisting habitual ways of moving and doing research. These ways are centered on speaking, reading and writing as well as on sitting, most of the time in front of a computer. They could be elaborated as ways of going against what is wrong with a place or the ways in which people are encouraged to move in them. Furthermore, they could combine scholarly and artistic methods as well as various forms of activism. They could be thought of as ways of making visible the movement of alternative ideas or barriers inhibiting the participation of individual people or communities in the activities taking place in a somehow inaccessible environment, for example, in the field of dance, research or education. Barrier-thetics and the splintered extension could be seen as ways of making these kinds of barriers visible and strange.

The smooth, the striated and the splintered A splintered extension could furthermore be thought of as opening a new side to the smoothness and the striatedness of spaces. Deleuze and Guattari use these terms to refer to processes and qualities which exist in various combinations everywhere. The concepts of the smooth and the striated were created by composer Pierre Boulez to consider musical time and used by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus to examine space and the

FORMING COMMON NOTIONS

213

direction of movement in it.8 They open their discussion on the smooth and the striated with observations of how fabrics and felts and their mixes are smooth and striated. Deleuze and Guattari write that ‘the city is a striated space par excellence’ and the sea ‘the archetype of smooth space’ (2013: 558–559). A spot in a town might be mainly striated because there are streets which direct the movement of people and vehicles. The same spot might have smooth qualities because of the movements of insects, the wind, the light, and other particles in the air which do not respect the routes and passages designed for people. In an open smooth place the direction of movements is less regulated than in a striated place. The smooth space, for them ‘is an amorphous, nonformal space’ (2013: 554, original emphasis). I wanted to discuss the splintered in relation to the concepts of the smooth and the striated with Tiilikainen. I hoped that we could specify what made our meeting room smooth, what was striated in it and what was splintered for us. We both danced and had a discussion in the space in order to grasp its splinteredness. For Tiilikainen the splintered could be a barrier existing in one’s mind, a thought which says inside a dancer’s head, ‘you can’t do something like that’. I then asked what kinds of splinters she experienced when we were a moment earlier dancing in the room. She answered that she had felt none. She felt nothing constrained her during our dancing because we were just the two of us and no-one was watching. She said that if we went to an open public space to dance, the case would be totally different. Tiilikainen’s experience indicates that it is not possible to tell simply by observing a space whether it is mainly smooth or striated. A small, restricted meeting room with a table and chairs was a smooth space for Tiilikainen and an open, outside space striated. The number of people watching her dancing instead of the number of square meters or the placement of furniture defined the smoothness and striatedness of spaces for Tiilikainen. Her visual disability might also have played a role in the way she experienced the meeting room. It was a safe, restricted space for a person with a limited vision. Inside this room, Tiilikainen did not have to be as careful in her movements as she would have had to be in an outside space populated by many other moving bodies. The smallness of the space made a freer way of moving possible for her. The word splintered (tikkuinen) may in Finnish colloquial language refer to surfaces with needle-like wooden particles or with sharp bits of glass. Dancing on this kind of materially splintered surface might make a human dancer’s skin bleed. On a more symbolic level, a splintered space is one where dancers experience a sense of hostility, maybe in the form of an inaccessible built environment or the evaluative gaze of an audience,

A discussion of the relation between Boulez’s terms and Deleuze and Guattari’s way of using them can be found in Scherzinger (2010: 112–118). 8

214

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

a guard, a policeman or a passer-by in a shopping street. Deleuze and Guattari attach many kinds of qualities to the concepts of the smooth and the striated. Nevertheless, the smooth and the striated are, in their texts, something other than emotional states or representations of how a space feels. The splintered extension of the smooth and the striated is the feel of the smooth and the striated in various spaces from the perspective of someone for whom the space is hostile. It is a word which may also be used to describe a singular mix of the smooth and the striated, a mix where an unequal power relation is made audible, visible or tangible. An unequal power relation in a space which is both smooth and striated can exist between a sighted person and a visually disabled person or a researcher and a participant. Instead of referring to the concrete combinations in which the smooth and the striated always exist with any specific philosophical concept, Deleuze and Guattari stay on the abstract plane of two concepts: the smooth and the striated. If splintered is approached as a common notion between Point, the bodies of Tiilikainen and me, and the concepts of the smooth and the striated, a question remains: Whose capacities of affecting and being affected does this composite movement-concept increase? The splintered situates itself in the space between a theoretical framework, a film, a dance form, a researcher and a participant. But what is the constitution and where are the boundaries of the body or bodies whose capacities it concerns? In order to be able to observe an increase or a diminution in a body’s capacities of affecting and being affected, one first needs to notice where a body is in my collaboration with Tiilikainen. Spinoza’s conception of the common notions is tied to the way he understands the body. According to Deleuze (1988: 54–55) ‘[e]ach existing body is characterized by a certain relation of motion and rest’ in Spinoza’s thought. Two or more bodies can ‘form a composite body having a greater power, a whole present in its parts’ when their relations of motion and rest adapt themselves to one another. This process of adapting oneself to one another is where common notions are formed (54–55). They are ways of relating. Deleuze (123) explains more closely how Spinoza understands a body. A body can be anything to which the following two propositions apply: first, a body can be ‘composed of an infinite number of particles; it is the relations of motion and rest, of speeds and slownesses between particles, that define a body, the individuality of a body’. This is a kinetic proposition. Second, ‘a body affects other bodies, or is affected by other bodies; it is this capacity for affecting and being affected that also defines a body in its individuality’ (54–55). This is a dynamic proposition. This understanding of a body in relation to movement and rest and as a capacity to affect and be affected means that a body in this analysis cannot be understood in advance. The qualities of the bodies collaborating in this analysis were taking shape simultaneously with the qualities of the common notions.

FORMING COMMON NOTIONS

215

When Tiilikainen and I were using the kinecept of the splintered extension in the listening room of the city library, we were moving in a way which can be considered atypical for people visiting this place. Our bodies formed an ensemble which created spaces of splintered extension inside and intermingling with the room. In the city library’s listening room this ensemble-body also included a piece of music entitled Tetras, composed of Iannis Xenakis and performed by the Arditti String Quartet. With the help of the kinecept of the splintered extension we were able to establish a playfully analytical kinetic relationship with objects such as a CD player and the walls of the room and, therefore, increase the capacities of our bodies with the properties of these objects. We could do this by dancing while the music was playing, by being aware of the elements we were dancing with, and by letting the experience raise new questions in our minds. The variation of the movement combination which Tiilikainen used was such that she was making a back and forth movement with one arm, directed downward, while at the same time making an extension with the other arm, directed upward. In her discussion of the smooth and the striated in the Restless Dance Company’s performance Proximal Hickey-Moody (2009: 65) asks how one creates ‘a space with an atmosphere that positively transforms the ways in which bodies can be thought’. She writes that smoothness is created when the space consisting of dancers’ bodies is ‘acknowledged as a historical, political artefact’ as well as ‘an environment in which ratios between matter and virtual possibilities are reworked’ (65). The acknowledgement of a space consisting of dancers’ bodies as an artifact refers here to the undoing of the naturalized connection between disability and medical discourses which Hickey-Moody analyses. The reworking of the ratios between matter and virtual possibilities means that a smooth space created by a performance by disabled dancers of Proximal can be thought of in the contexts of discourses other than medical, for example from the point of view of their own life histories. When Tiilikainen suggested that Xenakis’ Tetras might match the shaking movement, she added that this music demands some movement. She explained that Tetras sounded to her very different when she listened to it in different spaces. Tiilikainen had noticed the effects of locations on the piece as well as the varying impact of Tetras combined with different places on her body. Tiilikainen was on her way toward forming common notions with Tetras. When we listened to Tetras by using the splintered extension, we opened a point of view on this piece of music, or rather, a point of motion, which puts an emphasis on barriers. The acknowledgement of a space consisting of dancers’ bodies as an artifact refers to the fact that we were dancing in the listening room in ways that we had learned in movement improvisation classes, that, is, we danced by relating our own movements to those of the other and by responding kinetically to movement ideas we

216

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

received from the music, from the materials of the room, and from each other. The reworking of the ratios between matter and virtual possibilities in the same situation means looking at the ensemble consisting of a recording of Tetras, of our movements, of the floor, the ceiling, the walls, the loudspeakers, a couple of chairs, and a CD player as one composite body. All these actors were present, affecting and being affected by each other. The capacities of the ensemble that Tiilikainen and I became parts of while listening to Tetras were larger than any particular movement, dancer or piece of music alone could have been. Among its capacities, it was to give barriers a kinetic form. In the live performances of this particular kind of music, the audience is usually not expected to react kinetically to what they hear and see as musicians do. Even the library’s listening room was designed to invite and encourage us to sit on chairs while listening rather than dance. In the listening situation we gave Tetras an embodied form with our dance movements. In addition, we rendered it splintered by the shaking and extensions of our arms. We opened it to a point of motion which made it sound like an inaccessible environment.

Becoming-active: A politics of barrierthetics in music and dance research The use of movement as a tool in the analysis bears a resemblance to using it as a subject of analysis. Both of these orientations rest on the ethnographic fieldwork method of participant observation used by dance and performance scholars, ethnomusicologists and anthropologists. In dance ethnography, a researcher’s participation in dancing is a way of producing research material. The first-hand experiences of dancing are used in the analysis of interviews, video-recorded performances or field diaries documenting a situation where dancing has taken place. In scholarly research, the analysis of bodily movements and gestures is, nevertheless, usually conducted with the help of analytical concepts instead of analytical dance movements. This is the case, for example, in Small’s (1998) analysis of the practices of musical performance supported by the concept of musicking. The first-hand experiences of making physical movements may both support and problematize theories. They may also be part of the theories themselves. This is the case when theoretical ideas have been formed by means of moving or when examples concerning moving bodies have been used to develop theoretical concepts. In their capacity as research material and as parts of theory-making, movements rising from the bodies involved in research may be combined with each other and with philosophical concepts in ways which enrich these concepts, increase their accessibility to

FORMING COMMON NOTIONS

217

researchers and participants, and help to create points of view and points of motion for analysis. I suggest that when movements co-created by the researcher and research participant for analytical purposes are combined, and adapted to each other and when different kinds of research subjects are studied from the point of motion provided by these movements, these movements become kinecepts. The same kinecepts may function as a way of forming common notions when they increase the capacities of a participant, a researcher, a spectator, a concept or a research method. A kinecept in the analysis of movement improvisation might be developed on the basis of a dancer’s personal way of entering and leaving the dance floor or responding to other dancers’ activities in an individual style. This way of moving would become a kinecept when used in an analytical purpose, to study any topic. Recognizing instances of compatibility between bodies with the help of kinecepts does not mean a participant and a researcher should agree with one another on everything. I can learn to make some parts of my body work with some parts of other bodies in ethnographic encounters. Political philosopher Michael Hardt (1993: 94) writes that actual encounters are complicated and that there ‘may be different degrees of partial compatibility and partial conflict in an encounter, or, further, the affects can combine in a myriad of ways’. Hardt continues that when we experience joy in an encounter, we experience a joyful passive affection. This increases our power but never to the point of becoming active. Becoming active involves forming an idea of what is common to two or more bodies (98–100). Deleuze (1988) writes that ‘immediate experience gives us the effects of this or that body on ours, but not the relations that compose these bodies’ (118). Comprehending the relations that compose bodies as concepts involves building an active relationship with them. For me as an ethnographer this means that it is insufficient to notice what analytical concepts do to places, to a piece of music or to the ensembles I compose with a collaborator. What is required in order to be able to form a common notion is experimentation in the midst of analysis. One has to try out different ways to use a concept, to dance with it, to hold it, and to carry it with dance. This forms knowledge of the relations those concepts are composed of. Becoming-active also means that I can try to affect or reconfigure the given circumstances so that dancing can take place. Understood in this manner, becoming-active comes close to the politics of movement which Manning writes about. She describes this kind of politics in the making with the word concrescence by which she means growing together. According to Manning (2009) this word ‘signals the potential of such politics [of the not-yet]: the world as a dancing room’ (27–28). The idea of concrescence has a connection to the formation of common notions. Comprehending compatibilities is necessary in order to be able to grow together. This means making some parts of one’s body adapt themselves to parts of other bodies so that new capacities can come about. Elaborating on this, I understand

218

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

the politics of movement in two ways. First, I hear in it a request to pause to think together with research participants about the possible paths a collaboration could take before anything else happens. Second, I read the politics of movement as a suggestion to influence circumstances. Dancing should be made possible everywhere; the world should indeed become a dancing room. The politics of barrier-thetics adds an emphasis on barriers to the politics of movement, more specifically on the creation, preservation and consolidation of some barriers and the removal of others. A politics of barrier-thetics acknowledges that some barriers are valuable for the politics of movement to take place. Knowledge of whether a barrier is valuable or unnecessary relative to politics is situational and can be gained through analyzing the barrier in question from the point of view of differently situated bodies. The body (consisting here of music and movement) which was formed in the listening room enabled an observation that there are no dancing rooms in public libraries and that there should be. There are only rooms designed for listening to music while remaining relatively still. This observation was one among many capacities which were formed that day in the library. Staying still in a listening situation is a habit which many people do not experience as a barrier. But it is a barrier for those who want to appreciate music through wider extensive movements and the sensual and mental experiences they enable. This sort of barrier can be removed by organizing situations in Western art music culture where the listeners have an opportunity to move while the music is being performed. When  Tiilikainen later reflected on the capacities of the body which was formed in the listening room, she stated, that the back and forth movement became very  loose and relaxed with Tetras in comparison to how the movement had been with Point, which was strained and nervous. Practicing barrier-thetics in music and dance research means those habits which restrict kinetic listening, music-making and researching become strange. Barrierthetics also means seeing one’s own body as a dynamically unfolding part of larger bodies and using both individual and composite bodies as tools in removing these kinds of barriers. It is in this kind of politics that kinecepts and common notions in the form of movements can be of significant use.

Forming common notions through dance Analyzing movements and ways of moving as kinecepts and common notions means extending the capacities of analytical concepts toward the capacities of a dance movement. Managing to form common notions means managing to increase the capacities of concepts, a physical movement, a researcher and a participant. It was in the processes of adapting oneself to another as well as in adapting the use of verbal and

FORMING COMMON NOTIONS

219

philosophical discourses to the creation of dance movements typical for movement improvisation where common notions in my collaboration with Tiilikainen were found. A kinecept in the collaboration described in this chapter was created like this: a back and forth movement which intensified the feeling of distress in Point was transformed in a research meeting to another kind of movement (the tapping) and then to the word splintered. It was then combined with another kind of movement and used in this combination in different places in Joensuu. During this process it took the form of an analytical tool. This, in turn, helped to create a new concept, barrier-thetics. Ethnographic research on dance and music shares with the theory of common notions an ethos of ability and capability. Therefore, common notions can be regarded as accessible ways of doing research in cooperation with people who are not trained as researchers but who are interested in participating in analyzing how movements and concepts transform each other. The use of movements as analytical tools is a step toward the inclusion of people who think through movement in disability research. Some stages in a collaborative research process can take a kinetic form besides a spoken or a written form. I used the theory of common notions to develop a method for creating kinecepts in the context of the Deleuzian-Guattarian study of dance. The method that was taking form in my encounters with Tiilikainen brings to the Deleuzian-Guattarian study of dance a new way to use the concept of kinecept. Creating kinecepts for the analysis of the smoothness, striatedness and splinteredness of spaces means using both dancing and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical ideas during ethnographic encounters together with the collaborators instead of using them merely after these encounters. The encounters themselves are moments where a space, a movement and a philosophical concept can be analyzed. By combining dancing and discussing it is possible to develop both dancerly and philosophical ideas with any collaborator who is interested in this kind of activity. In music and dance research a kinecept may be used to perform both a piece of music, a dance or an analysis. A movement which is usually related to the playing of an instrument or to singing can be used as a kinecept. It can be transformed during the analytical process to another movement. The feeling of a movement is important when a researcher and a participant move from the creation and identification of useful movements toward the combinations of these movements and to their use in the analysis. A kinecept in this sense is an analytical tool which, as a physical movement, has a very material form. It can be used in the analysis of any visual, kinetic, tactile or audible research material through moving one’s body as part of larger bodies consisting of movements, concepts and spaces. A kinecept, in its physicality, can be approached as one of the many material sides of a common notion.

220

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Acknowledgment I wish to thank Anneli Tiilikainen for dancing, talking, writing and performing with me.

References Unpublished video material made by the author with Anneli Tiilikainen in Joensuu, Finland. Video 1 and 2: 26 September 2013. Video 3: 27–28 September 2013. Point (2009). Producer: Tiina Laine and Pirjo Ojala. Choreographer: Leena Koskinen. Director: Pirjo Ojala. Composer: Markku Kaikkonen and Marko Koivu. Dancers: Taika-tanssi: Hanna Väätäinen, Susanna Tuominen, Jeanette And, Ila Hellevaara, Salli Holppi, Eeva Kinnunen, Päivi Peltonen, Sisko-Liisa Puranen, Tiina Varjonen, Antti Virta, Sirpa Vuorinen. Sound: Lauri Uusitalo. Musicians: Kehitysvammaisten musiikkityöpaja (Lyhty ry) and Musiikin erityispalvelukeskus. Resonaari: Kari Aalto, Sami Helle, Markku Kaikkonen, Marko Koivu, Lauri Uusitalo. Cinematography: Tiina Laine and Veli-Pekka Haastola. Editing: Tiina Laine. Production Assistant: Johanna Hakanen. Personal Assistants: Mika Korhonen, Niina Kaanela, Päivi Kauppinen, Mirja Kosteila, Kim Bjerregård Madsen, Mia Pajuniemi, Zhanna Porri. Distributors: Pirjo Ojala and Tiina Laine.

Internet sources Deleuze, G. (2007), ‘On Spinoza’, Lectures by Gilles Deleuze. Available online: http://deleuzelectures.blogspot.fi/2007/02/on-spinoza.html (accessed 12 January 2015).

Literature Block, P., D. Kasnitz, A. Nishida and N. Pollard, eds (2016), Occupying Disability: Critical Approaches to Community, Justice, and Decolonizing Disability, Dordrecht: Springer. Burt, R. (2009), ‘What the Dancing Body Can Do? Spinoza and the Ethics of Experimental Theatre Dance’, in V. A. Briginshaw and R. Burt, Writing Dancing Together, 204–216, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Cancienne, M. B. and C. Bagley (2008), ‘Dance as Method: The Process and Product of Movement in Educational Research’, in P. Liamputtong and J. Rumbold (eds), Knowing Differently: Arts-Based and Collaborative Research Methods, 169–186, New York: Nova Science Publishers. Deleuze, G. (1981/2003), Spinoza. Philosophie pratique, Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.

FORMING COMMON NOTIONS

221

Deleuze, G. (1988), Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley, San Francisco: City Lights Books. Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (2013), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. B. Massumi, London: Bloomsbury. Dyer, B. and T. Löytönen (2012), ‘Engaging Dialogue: Co-creating Communities of Collaborative Inquiry’, Research in Dance Education, 12 (1): 121–147. Fikentscher, K. (2000), “You Better Work!” Underground Dance Music in New York City, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Fluehr-Lobban, C. (2008), ‘Collaborative Anthropology as Twenty-First-Century Ethical Anthropology’, Collaborative Anthropologies, 1: 175–182. Gatens, M. (2009), ‘Introduction: Through Spinoza’s “Looking Glass” ’, in M. Gatens (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza, 1–28, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Hardt, M. (1993), Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hickey-Moody, A. C. (2009), Unimaginable Bodies: Intellectual Disability, Performance and Becomings, Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Lorraine, T. (2011), Deleuze and Guattari’s Immanent Ethics: Theory, Subjectivity, and Duration, Albany: State University of New York. Löytönen, T. (2011), ‘Dance Education and Emotions: Articulating Unspoken Values in the Everyday Life of a Dance School’, in D. Davida (ed.), Fields in Motion: Ethnography in the Worlds of Dance, 255–276, Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Manning, E. (2007), Politics of Touch: Sense, Movement, Sovereignty, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Manning, E. (2009), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy, Cambridge: MIT Press. Manning, E. (2013), Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance, Durham: Duke University Press. McCormack, D. P. (2013), Refrains for Moving Bodies. Experience and Experiment in Affective Spaces, Durham: Duke University Press. Metheny, E. (1965), Connotations of Movement in Sport and Dance: A Collection of Speeches about Sport and Dance as Significant Forms of Human Behavior, Dubuque: Wm. C. Brown Company Publishers. Rappaport, J. (2008), ‘Beyond Participant Observation: Collaborative Ethnography as Theoretical Innovation’, Collaborative Anthropologies, 1: 1–31. Rice, C., E. Chandler, E. Harrison, K. Liddiard and M. Ferrari (2015), ‘Project Re•Vision: Disability at the Edges of Representation’, Disability and Society, 30 (4): 513–527. Scherzinger, M. (2010), ‘Enforced Deterritorialization, or the Trouble with Musical Politics’, in B. Hulse and N. Nesbitt (eds), Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music, 103–128, Farnham: Ashgate. Sitter, K. C. (2015), ‘Participatory Video Analysis in Disability Research’, Disability and Society, 30 (6): 910–923. Small, C. (1998), Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening, Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Spinoza, B. (1985), ‘Ethics’, in E. Curley (ed. and trans.), The Collected Works of Spinoza, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

222

MUSICAL ENCOUNTERS WITH DELEUZE AND GUATTARI

Tiainen, M. and J. Parikka (2013), ‘The Primacy of Movement: Variation, Intermediality and Biopolitics in Tero Saarinen’s Hunt’, in E. Barrett and B. Bolt (eds), Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts, 205–224, London: I.B.Tauris. Turetsky, P. (2004), ‘Rhythm: Assemblage and Event’, in I. Buchanan and M. Swiboda (eds), Deleuze and Music, 140–158, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

CONTRIBUTORS

Michelle Duffy, PhD Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Federation University Australia and Director of the Centre of Research for Resilient Communities Duffy’s research examines the relation of the experiential and the senses in our lives at different spatial levels, from the global to more everyday and local processes between individuals, communities and societies. Elizabeth Gould, D.M.A. Associate Professor, Music Education, Faculty of Music, University of Toronto Gould’s research focuses on gender and sexuality in the context of feminisms, Deleuzian and queer theories. Jay Hammond, PhD Candidate Cultural Anthropology at Duke University Hammond’s ethnographic and historical research on American music engages theoretical questions around sound, labor and the body. Taru Leppänen, PhD Senior Lecturer of Gender Studies, University of Turku Leppänen’s research engages with feminist new materialisms, feminist and cultural studies of music, music and media, and children’s music cultures. Sally Macarthur, PhD Associate Professor of Musicology and Director of Academic Program (Music) at Western Sydney University, Australia Macarthur’s work focuses on recent musical practices in Australia with a particular emphasis on music of the Western classical tradition and women’s music.

224

CONTRIBUTORS

Pirkko Moisala, PhD Professor of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at the University of Helsinki Moisala’s research interests include cultural and gender studies of Western art music, theory and methods of ethnomusicology, women composers and indigenous musics. Marie Thompson, PhD Lecturer at Lincoln School of Film and Media, University of Lincoln, UK Thomson’s research centers on the affective, material and gendered dimensions of sound, noise and music. Milla Tiainen, PhD Senior Lecturer in the Department of Musicology, University of Helsinki Tiainen’s research and teaching focus on contemporary musical and vocal performances, connections between opera and new media, process thinking in art and cultural studies, and new materialist and posthumanist thinking. Janne Vanhanen, PhD Postdoctoral researcher at the department of Aesthetics, University of Helsinki Vanhanen is a philosopher whose current research project is about the concept of noise, situated into the artistic praxis of experimental music. Hanna Väätäinen, PhD Independent scholar Väätäinen has carried out research on disability and gender, competitive ballroom dancing, movement improvisation and the musical practices of the Swedish-speaking people in Finland.

INDEX

Note: The letters ‘f’ and ‘n’ following locators refer to figures and notes. abstraction 191 abstract line 18, 59 abstract machine 60 a cappella 123, 124 acoustemology 19 acoustics 40, 119, 150, 179, 182, 195 n.4 activism 212 actor-network theory 171 n.1 actuality 99, 108, 178 actualization 2, 23, 45, 64, 90, 100, 108, 110, 172 n.2, 178 Adams, Jason Michael 67 Adams, Rachel 36 adequate ideas 206 Adorno, Theodor 74 Aerosmith 112f, 122f, 124 aesthetics 16, 71, 74, 80, 89, 94, 95, 96, 99, 100, 111, 134, 142, 152, 155, 177, 178, 189, 212 affect 3, 7, 8, 12–14, 45, 54, 60, 61, 92–3, 99, 101, 108, 110, 138 and affection 12, 13 definition of 12 emotion and 12, 189–200 and listening 143, 169, 177, 181 movement and 207, 208, 209, 214, 216, 217 and performance 110–11, 118, 124, 125, 130, 131, 132, 138, 141–2, 143 rituality and 130, 132, 137–9, 143 sensation and 169 of sound 149–50, 154, 158–65, 189–200

Spinozan-Deleuzian 13, 20, 138, 150, 155–8, 164, 191, 207 African-American culture 68–71, 74, 80–2, 114, 118, 119. See also jazz African music-making 69 n.2, 80 Afrocentric philosophy 80 Agawu, Kofi 11 agency 9, 18, 40, 41, 42, 43, 91, 135, 140, 141, 155 aggregates/aggregation 17, 59, 77, 79, 185 Alaimo, Stacy 100–1 Albertsen, Niels 134 Algae Opera, The 18 Ashcroft’s role 89, 92, 93–6, 97, 99 and biotechnology 18, 89, 92–4, 97, 99, 101 body/voice/algae interrelations 18, 93–6, 97, 99–100 collaborative projects 89, 103 and Deleuzian-Guattarian assemblage 90–2, 95, 98–9 and emerging artistic performances 89–90 fictional world of 2060 89, 97, 101 as interspecies performance 100, 102 relations of exteriority in 92–7 role of transformation in 93 all black race records 74 Allen, Aaron 19, 103 Allen, Kris 107 all white hillbilly records 74 Āma Samuha events, Nepal 14, 132, 135–42

226

INDEX

American Idol 21, 107. See also Lambert, Adam (American Idol competition) contestant eligibility 114 glam narratives and 112–14 Simon and Ryan 112 weekly theme 112f, 115f, 118, 119f, 120, 121, 122f American Sign Language 34, 37 analogue and resemblance 1 Anderson, Ben 191 Anderson, Laurie 158 Andors, Ellen 135 n.10 androgyny 113 animal individuals 9 animals 10, 11, 12, 19, 37, 53, 63, 64, 89, 91, 101, 153, 156, 157 animism 134 n.7 Ansdell, Gary 196 Ansell, Nicola 193 anthropocentrism 40–1, 89 anthropology/anthropologists 15, 16, 35, 42, 71, 137–8, 216 anti-art 61 anti-genealogy 76 antigravity 181 anti-racism 22, 67–8, 75, 81–2 Antokolotz, Elliott 60 arboreal root structures 76 Argentina 55, 61 Armstrong, Louis 69 n.2, 71 art conceptual 176 contemporary 1 education 44 of ethics 206 experimental 175 forms of 52, 61, 152, 170 as life-event 173 minoritarian 64 women’s representations in 61 Artaud, Antonin 61 art music 4, 5–6, 15, 24, 61, 63, 96, 129, 171, 172, 218 art theory 3, 173 Ashcroft, Louise 88–9, 92–7, 99–102 Ashley, Robert 182 Askew, Kelly 9, 131

Asplund, Christian 172 assemblage Algae Opera 87–103 as anti-structural concept 18 collective 98 definition of 14 Deleuze-Parnet concept 16, 131 Deleuzian-Guattarian 2, 3, 5, 7, 14–20 Georgina Born’s view 16–17 listening 16, 170, 185, 189–200 Lucier’s wire 157 machinic 17, 19, 60–3, 92, 98, 99, 100, 101 and media technologies 150, 157, 161 molar 17, 18 molecular 17–18 of musical performance 131–2, 139–40, 142–3 music-theatre 59, 60–3 territorialized 115 Tiainen’s view 18–19, 90–2 Atkinson, Paul 191 Attali, Jacques 74, 189 attention 176 Aubert, Laurent 11 audible entanglements 15 audience Deaf/non-Deaf 34, 37–8, 40, 42, 46 experience 9 gaze of the 213–14 perceptions 100, 177 and performers/performances 60, 61, 73, 87, 88, 95, 97, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112–13, 123, 134, 136–8, 153–4, 171, 179, 181, 198, 216 response 73, 176, 195 audism 12, 34, 35, 37–8, 41, 42, 43–4, 46 Auslander, Philip 107, 108, 110, 113 Austern, Linda Phyllis 13 Australia 9, 51, 53 n.1, 192, 208 authorship 11, 24, 36, 41–4, 46 autism 181 autistic field of experience 181 autonomy 16, 23, 40, 43, 52, 95, 96, 156, 164

INDEX

avant-garde 69 n.2, 151, 152, 176 awareness 137, 150, 179, 180 axiom, Spinozan 13, 42, 43, 149 Ayres, Emma 51 backbeat 115, 116, 117, 120, 121, 124, 125 background noise 177, 197, 198 Bacon, Francis 169, 170 Bagley, Carl 209 n.6 ballad 118, 121, 125 Barad, Karen 46 n.5 barrier-thetics 209, 212, 218, 219 Barthes, Roland 98, 174 Barz, Gregory 11 bass 40, 119, 124 Bauman, H-Dirksen L. 42 Bayles, Martha 113, 114 beat 40, 73, 74, 78, 116, 117, 123–4 Bechet, Sidney 71 Beckman, Frida 3 becoming active 216, 217 animal 53, 63 authors 43 being and 129 and chance 11 child 44 Deaf 12, 43, 44–6 Deleuzian-Guattarian 8–12, 44, 45 dichotomies 44 imperceptible 10, 43, 46, 53, 64 insect 53 man 10–11 mineral 53 molecular 35, 36, 38, 53 as movements 45 as music, Deleuze/Guattari philosophy 2, 23, 24, 40–1 new 22, 41, 42, 43 non-human 19 other 44 people 130 posthuman 19 process 2, 10, 24, 43, 44, 135, 138, 140, 142, 178 queer (transversal) 21, 108–11 sexual 108

227

subjective 180 unpredictable 20–1, 23 woman 9–10, 44, 45, 51–65, 140 Bee Gees 112f, 118, 119f Beethoven, Ludwig van 163 Beethoven’s Nightmare 34 being-woman 53, 64 Bell, Alexander Graham 42 Bellamy, Matthew 122 belonging, sense of 190, 192, 199 Béneker, Tine 193 Benitez, Joaquim 152 Bennett, David 54, 63 Bennett, Jane 3, 19–20, 40, 92, 100 Bergen, Véronique 55, 56, 58 Berger, Harri 13 Bergson, Henri 8, 73, 76–7, 79, 82, 155 Berklee College of Music 158 Berliner, Paul 68, 70 BEYOND BIENNIAL, Amsterdam 88 Biddle, Ian 13, 138 Bidima, Jean-Godefroy 38, 39 Biehl, João 130 binary 11, 13, 35, 51, 53, 55, 56, 57, 68, 99, 116 n.5, 135, 150–1, 155, 161 biodiversity 89, 93, 97 biopolitics 211 Birley, Dawn Jani 37 Bissell, David 191 black hole 181 Black Lives Matter movement 68, 82 Black Nationalism 68, 69, 80 black neo-classicism 69, 80 blackness 80, 114 Blazek, Matej 193 Block, Pamela 208 blues 73, 80 body dancing 205–19 Deaf/non-Deaf 36, 38–40, 43–6 Deleuze/Guattari on 59 Deleuzian 13, 110 experimental music and 149–65 gendered/sexed/racialized 9 listening 169–85, 189–200, 218 and mind concept 8, 12, 14, 22, 40, 95, 99, 151, 157, 164, 177, 197

228

INDEX

and musical performance 129–43, 207 non-anthropocentric notion of 149–65 and painting 169, 170 queer 107–25 and race 22, 68, 82 sonorous 170–1 Spinozan-Deleuzian 13, 149, 154–8, 159, 160, 165, 206, 207 and voice 87–103, 114 Body without Organs 7, 59, 169–73, 177, 180, 181, 182, 184–5 Bogue, Ronald 5, 35, 37, 108, 111, 129, 130, 133 Bohlman, Philip 9 Bolan, Marc 113 Bondi, Liz 191 Bonnet, François J. 182 Bonpo tradition, Tibetan 134 n.7 Born, Georgina 9, 16, 21, 91 Boswell Sisters 71 Boulez, Pierre 212, 213 n.8 Boundas, Constantin V. 122 n.12 Boursier-Mougenot, Céleste 152 Bowie, David 113 Boyd, Candice 196, 197 Braidotti, Rosi 3, 19, 20, 102 Braxton, Anthony 69, 80–1 Brennan, Teresa 191, 200 Brett, Philip 149 Bricusse, Leslie 122 n.13 bridge 117, 125 Brophy, Philip 101 Brown, John 75 Buchanan, Ian 4, 14, 109 Buck, Chris 163 Buddhism 134 n.7, 137 Burnett, Joseph 158 Burt, Ramsay 207 Burton, Michael See BurtonNitta BurtonNitta 88–90, 93–9, 102 website 89, 90, 93, 99 Butler, Judith 108 n.1, 123 Cage, John 10, 152–3, 162, 171–9, 181, 182, 185 4’33” 176–7, 178 Campbell, Edward 5, 54

Cancienne, Mary Beth 209 n.6 Cardinia Shire Council 192 Carmichael, Hoagy 71 cartography 56, 58–9, 62, 182, 189 Cash, Johnny 117 Catholic Church 57 Cavarero, Adriana 91 CD system (compact disc technologies) 34, 157, 161–4, 215, 216 Celiberti, Silvia 102 cello 60–1, 157, 158–60 chance operations 172 change 10, 11, 56, 65, 94, 103, 131–2, 135, 138, 142, 151, 161, 177, 192, 193 chaos 67, 109, 138 Charleston 68 Chavez, Maria 158 Chion, Michel 182 chord 117, 118, 119, 123 chorus 116–21, 124 Chow, Rey 197 Cimini, Amy 155 Citron, Marcia 21 Civil Rights Movement, US 68, 118, 123 Cixous, Hélène 98 Clark, Liat 102 Clarke, Simon 191 Clark-Ibánez, Marisol 193 n.3 classical music 1, 4, 15, 69 n.2, 80, 87, 89, 95, 110, 150, 158 classicism 69, 80 Clayton, Martin 15, 21 cliché 109 climate change 89 coding/decoding 17, 21, 131, 134 Colebrook, Claire 2, 4, 7, 54, 55, 58, 59, 63, 75, 130, 132 Coleman, Rebecca 3, 4, 20, 138 collaboration 37, 97, 153, 154, 205–19 collective assemblages of enunciation 19, 92, 98 Colman, Felicity J. 45 Cologne 55, 62 colour 38, 95, 118, 181, 191, 205 common notions 7, 173, 181, 205–19 complexity 15, 61, 62

INDEX

composer-creator 1 composer-performer 152, 158–60, 171 composing/composition. See also improvisation avant-garde 69 n.2, 80 Bidima’s view 38–9 BurtonNitta’s Algae Opera 87–103 creative 16, 189–200 defined 39 electronic 80 experimental music 149–65, 169–85 Henderson’s Rinse Cycle 51–65 Images of Home project 189–200 jazz 67–82 of movements/dance work 205–19 novel methods of 172 rules of 178, 190 computers 40, 210, 211, 212 concepts 6–7, 19, 23, 77, 206 concept and content 177 concept creation 21, 108, 205, 206 n.3, 207, 211–12, 219 concert halls 5, 150, 151, 176 concrescence 217 Conley, Verena Andermatt 21, 45, 108 consciousness 57, 77, 78, 160, 174, 175, 177, 180, 181, 183 conservatory 17, 74 contact improvisation 21, 205 n.1 contraction 183–4 Cook, Nicholas 13, 16, 21, 22, 96, 100 Coole, Diana 100 Cooley, Timothy J. 11, 190 copyright laws 11, 41, 42 corporeality 5, 9, 16, 22, 91, 100, 111, 139, 141, 208 cosmology 78, 80, 134, 141, 181 cosmos, music and 5, 37 coterie 113 counterculture 113 counterpoint 60 cover songs 114, 117, 120, 121, 122, 123 Cowell, Simon 112 Cox, Christoph 150, 151, 152, 165, 197, 198 Cox, Frank 95

229

Creative Music (Braxton) 80 creole culture 70 cross-dressing 113 Crowley, Vicki 44 Cull, Laura 3, 16 n.1, 52, 53, 55–6 cultural musicology 8, 9, 11, 13, 149 culture, definition 15, 139 Cusick, Suzanne 9, 21, 22, 100 dance contemporary 205, 211 epic dramas 133 Gullah-Geechee culture 72, 81 music 69 music and 72, 80, 81, 129–43, 205–19 Tamu culture 131, 133–42 dance research 21, 205–19 barrier-thetics and splintered extension 212 collaborators’ skills/views 207, 208, 209, 213 ethnographic encounters 207 first-hand experiences 216 formation of common notions 206–7, 208, 215, 218–19 movement ideas and concepts 206 n.3, 207, 212, 215–16 movements and spaces 209, 210–15 process-oriented work 207, 209 viewings/study of Point 209, 210–11, 212, 218 Davies, Bronwyn 56, 61 Davies, Jared 164 Davies, William 195 n.4 Davis, Angela Y. 70 Davis, Sammy, Jr. 122 Dawe, Kevin 103 d/Deaf and d/Deafness 22, 33–46 audiences 37–8 categorization and classification 36 Crowley’s interpretation 44 and disability 36, 44, 45 distinctions 33 n.1 as linguistic minority 36, 44 and non-Deaf 36, 44–6 social movement 44 n.4 deejaying 210 n.7

230

INDEX

Deep Listening 179–82 DeLanda, Manuel 91, 92, 95, 142 Deleuze, Gilles and affect 155 ‘a people to come’ 130 on Bacon 169, 170, 184 and becoming 8, 41, 52, 53, 55 body, notion of 7, 13, 169–70, 207, 208, 214, 217 and difference 108, 111 encounters, concept of 1 fabulation 130 and film music 4 influence 8 and music 54, 68, 109, 115, 169, 191 and musical performances 132, 143 nomad thought 58 ontology 4 and painting 169, 170 ‘philosophy of the real’ 77 and politics 55–6 and race 67–70, 80, 81 and rhythm 40, 82, 191 scholarship on 4 and sensation 40, 41, 176 on Spinoza 149, 150, 154–5, 164–5, 206 on thinking/learning/ experimentation 172 transverse way 111, 125 and voice studies 90–2 Deleuze and Félix Guattari affect 12–14, 141, 191, 208 assemblage (agencement) 14–20, 58–9, 90–2, 95, 98–101, 103, 131, 191–2, 196, 199 becoming 8–12, 20–1, 44, 53, 64, 77, 138, 208 body 110–11, 155, 198, 207, 209 and Cage 173, 175, 177 concepts 6–7, 23 on dance 219 ethics and politics 20–2 on experimentation and learning 173, 175, 184, 199 habit 183–4 and haptic concepts 39

on immanence 2, 16 n.1, 177–8 imperceptible 43 inorganic life 182–3 milieu 153 molar/molecular 17–18, 35–6, 38, 43, 45, 46 on music 2, 4–5, 34, 37, 43, 81, 124, 171, 184–5 on musical performances 143 in music and sound studies 3–6, 23–4 on noise 185 ‘people to come, a’ 130 process philosophy 2, 90 on queering 108 on race and raciality 45 reading of Spinoza 13 on reality 7 on rhizome 69, 70, 76, 79, 118 on rhythm 67, 70, 124 schizoanalysis 59, 69–70 self, the 61, 191 on sensation 42 smooth/striated concept 209, 212–16, 219 theory of time 70, 72, 73, 76, 78, 79, 191 transversal 115, 118 Deleuze Connections series 4 Deleuze Studies 4 del Rio, Elena 3, 35, 108, 110, 111 DeMarinis, Paul 161, 162 Demers, Joanna 151 DeNora, Tia 13, 109, 110, 191 Derrida, Jacques 3 Descartes, Rene 155, 157, 206 n.2 desire 21, 55, 58–9, 64, 108, 109, 111, 114, 116, 117, 118, 120, 143, 152, 199, 206 deterritorialization 5, 17–18, 37, 59, 60, 61, 111, 114, 116, 117, 125, 131, 141, 142, 184 Dewsbury, John David 196 diagram 56 Dickinson, Peter 175 difference 1, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 18, 36, 53, 54, 56, 57, 60, 64, 76, 91, 92, 100, 101, 108–9, 111, 132, 155, 170, 179, 183, 190

INDEX

difference-in-itself 52 differenciation 61 differentiation 51, 64, 132, 161 digital networks 18 digital sound 162, 163, 193 Diken, Bülent 134 disability/disabled people 2, 7, 36, 42, 44–5, 207–9, 213–15, 219. See also d/Deaf and d/Deafness misfit, idea of 42 rights of 36 disability research 205–19 disco 113–14, 118–21 discourse 2, 14, 22, 42, 43, 54, 68, 69, 79, 82, 98, 107, 111, 131, 150, 151, 153, 165, 208, 215, 219 discursive and material aspects 81, 82, 89, 97, 99, 141, 142, 165 modes of analysis 150, 165 dissonance 60 DIY music spaces 150, 151 Dogantan-Dack, Mine 100 Dolphijn, Rick. 46 n.5, 151 Donnie Darko 121 doubles/doubling 35, 61, 109, 124, 199 Dowling, Robyn 193 downbeat 78, 116, 124 doxa 54, 109 drag 114, 123 Draper, Jimmy 113, 116 n.5 drone music 151, 180, 182 drums/drumming 38, 40, 69, 70, 72, 74, 78, 82, 121, 133, 135, 136, 139, 140, 141, 170 dualism 18, 36, 56, 111, 150–1, 157, 165, 182, 191 n.1 Dubois, Danièle 195 n.4 Duffy, Michelle 16, 189–200 Dulwich Festival, London 88 duration 63, 76–7, 79, 176 DVD 34, 38 Dyer, Becky 209 n.6 Dyer, Richard 118 ecocrises 89, 96, 103 eco/ethno/musicology 19 ecosystemic mutations 89

231

Eidsheim, Nina 13 electronica 151 electronic music 151 n.1, 179 emancipation 64 embeddedness 15, 19, 52, 154, 191 embodied/embodiment 14, 46, 68, 79, 82, 88, 109, 114, 120, 121, 130, 132, 138, 139–43, 149, 179–80, 210, 216 emergent, the 14, 92, 96, 139 emotion and affect 12, 189–200 and bodily expressions of 191, 194 and body motions 38, 40, 110, 143 definition of 190–1 music and 13, 181, 190–1 and performance 110, 115, 117, 119, 120, 121, 125, 143 empiricism 176 empty space/time 175, 177 encounters, definition of 1, 24 ensemble 12, 18, 88, 119, 156, 180, 209, 215, 216, 217 Ensemble Offspring 53 n.1, 60 environmental sounds 195–6 epistemology of the console 113 Erlmann, Veit 35 Ernst, Wolfgang 182 escape 108 essentialism 8, 57, 115 n.4 ethics 19, 20–2, 76–9, 111 ethnicity 9, 11, 132 ethnocentrism 129 ethnomusicology/ethnomusicologists 2, 7, 9, 11, 13, 14, 15, 19, 21–4, 35, 100, 110, 112–13, 129–31, 134 n.9, 142–3, 210 n.7, 216 ethos 52, 61, 179, 219 Euclid 206 n.2 Europe/European 10, 45, 69 n.2, 70, 80, 82, 129, 195 n.4 Eurovision Song Contest 34 Evens, Aden 159–60 evolutionary theory 76 exclusion 45, 74 experimental music 2, 10, 13, 56, 69, 149–65, 169–85 vs. avant-garde 152, 176

232

INDEX

Cage’s work 10, 152–3, 162, 171–9, 181, 182, 185 categorization of 171 n.1 composers as ‘Gods’ 152–3 composing and listening 171–85 definitions of 151–2, 171 n.1 Lee’s style with the cello 158–60 listening practices (expanded listening) 171–85 Lucier’s work on wire 153–4, 164 notions in 152 Oliveros’ work 171, 179–82 post-war 175, 179 relationality and materiality 164–5 and sound art 152 Tone’s work with the CD system 161–4 as a verb 152, 172 vs. Western art-music 171 experimental music-theatre 51–65 experimental psychology 97 experimentation common notion 217 Deleuze/Guattari on 171, 173 free 69, 80 and learning 172, 173, 184 sonic 171–3 extra-musical category 52 fabulation 130 facial expressions 35, 37, 38 falsetto 114, 117, 119, 121, 123 fantasy 11, 110 Fast, Susan 113, 115 n.4, 124 faux homosexuality 112f, 114, 115f, 116, 119f, 122f, 123 Feld, Steven 19, 70, 134 n.9 femininity 9–10, 11, 55, 58, 62, 64, 87, 124 feminist musicology 5, 13, 62, 100 Fikentscher, Kai 210 n.7 film sound 182 Fine, Michelle 36 Finland 34, 36 Finnegan, Ruth 13 Fleming, Amy 97 Flieger, Jerry Aline 44 Florida 70

Floyd, Samuel A., Jr. 72 Fluehr-Lobban, Carolyn 209 n.6 folklore 74 folk music 69 n.2, 97 Foucault, Michel 98 Fox Network 107 François, Anne-Lise 119 Frank, Gillian 114 Frankfurt School 74 free improvisation 69 n.2, 150, 151, 161 free jazz 68, 69, 72, 151, 158 frequency 35, 39, 40, 95, 97, 172 n.2, 180 Friedner, Michele 35, 38, 42 fringe art 59 Frith, Simon 9, 109, 110, 111 Frost, Samantha 100 Fulford, Robert 33 Fuller, Matthew 3 Fuller, Simon 113 funeral dirge 69 n.2 funk music 113–14, 120 gags 9, 55, 60, 62 Gallagher, Michael 199 Galliford, Mark 111 Gameshow Outpatient 88–9, 93, 97 Gann, Kyle 176 Garber, Marjorie 22 Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie 42 Gatens, Moira 206, 207 gay bashing 116–17, 120 Gayle, Charles 72 gay/straight binary 107, 113, 116 n.5 gaze, of the audience 213 gender and the body 9 category 132, 135, 137, 140, 141 difference 8–9, 100, 110 hierarchy 22 identity 8, 9 performativity 108 n.1, 140 n.18 -related social norms 132, 135, 142 and sexuality 9, 14, 21, 100, 107–8, 111, 113–15, 123–4 stereotypes 51 studies 3

INDEX

genealogy 76 genius 61 Genosko, Gary 69, 79, 80 genre 4, 34, 55, 56, 60, 61, 68–70, 74–5, 79, 119, 136 n.16, 150, 151, 165 Georgia 70, 71 Georgia Sea Island 68 Germany/German 54, 61, 135 gesture 17, 37, 38, 60, 63, 82, 103, 109, 110, 139 Ghātu dance drama 133 gigs 71, 73 Gilbert, Jeremy 68 Gilroy, Paul 68 glam rock 107–8, 111, 113–14 Glennie, Evelyn 34, 39 glissandi 60, 87, 118, 158 glitch 151, 161, 163 global markets 18 Goa, India 68 Goodchild, Philip 4 Goodman, Benny 71 Goodman, Steve 35, 40–1, 174 good sense 54 Gorman-Murray, Andrew 193 Gould, Elizabeth 21, 107–25 Gramex 41 Grandin, Ingemar 136 n.16 Grand Ole Opry, Nashville 112f, 115f, 117 Grant, Angela 193 Greene, Doyle 115, 118 n.10 Griffith, Miles 72 Grigoriadis, Vanessa 113, 116 n.6, 117 n.8 groove 67, 70, 73–5, 78, 79, 82 and racism 74, 75 Grosz, Elizabeth 3, 45, 51–2, 53, 55, 58, 63, 64, 109 grotesque 64 Group Ongaku 161 Grusin, Richard 19 Guattari, Félix. See also Deleuze and Félix Guattari three ecologies 92, 103 Guilbault, Jocelyne 9, 15 guitar 113, 115–17, 119, 120, 121, 123–5, 153, 158, 159

233

Gullah-Geechee rhythm/culture 67–82 Guns N Roses 117 Gurung music 129–43 Guy, Nancy 19 Haavisto, Pekka 34 habit 56–7, 109, 172, 175, 183–4, 185, 208 n.4, 218 Hainge, Greg 185 hair metal 114 Haiti 69 n.2 Halberstam, Judith 114 Hall, Deborah 193 n.3 Hallam, Susan 138 Halonen, Tarja 34 Hammond, Jay 22, 67–82 Happenings 173 haptic 38, 39 Haraway, Donna 19 hard rock 113, 120, 122, 125 Hardt, Michael 217 harmonic structures 69 n.2, 151 harmony 60–1, 68, 117, 120, 158, 178, 189 Harris, Mark 116 n.5 Harvard University 175 Hasty, Christopher 54, 196 hegemonic masculinity 111, 114 Hekman, Susan 100–1 Heller, Michael C. 72 Helmreich, Stefan 35, 38, 42 Henderson, Moya 9, 51–65 hermeneutics 165 Herndon, Marcia 129 Herzog, Amy 3, 6 Hesmondhalgh, David 9 heterogeneity 2, 5, 7, 9, 12, 14, 17, 90, 91, 92, 96, 103, 131, 170, 171 n.1, 177 heteronormativity 21, 108, 111, 112f, 114, 115f, 116, 117, 119f, 120, 122f, 123, 124, 125 heterosexuality 112, 113, 114, 116, 123, 125 h/Hearing. See also d/Deaf and d/ Deafness critical studies 36, 46 and listening 36

234

materiality of 35 multisensory 170 music and 40, 44, 45 passive 174 and sight 37–9 touch and 39–40, 184 and voicing 42 Hickey-Moody, Anna Catherine 44, 51, 59, 207–8, 215 high art 61, 63, 69 n.2, 71 Hinduism 132 n.3, 134 n.7 hip hop 11, 33–46, 151 hippie counterculture 113 history vs. becoming 56 Holland, Eugene 45, 68, 69 Holloway, Joseph E. 71 Hollywood 69 n.2 homogeneity 52 homophobia 112, 115, 116 n.7, 117, 118, 120 homosexuality 21, 108, 113, 114. See also queer Hongisto, Ilona 3 Horkheimer, Max 74 Hot Jazz Jumpers 72 Hraňová, Petra 193 Hu, Alice 37 Hulse, Brian 4 human/non-human elements 12, 14, 15, 18, 19–20, 35, 40–3, 46, 87–103, 134, 139, 150–5, 159, 160, 165, 182, 191, 196, 197 Humphries, Tom 33 n.1 Husserl, Edmund 174 hybrid 100 hysteria 62, 63, 118, 169, 170 idea and actions 164, 211 adequate 206 formation 2 movement 206, 207, 209, 212, 215–17 of music 54, 176, 178, 195, 196 identity and belonging 190 categorizations 44 creation 54

INDEX

d/Deaf 33 n.1, 36, 42, 44–5 and difference 36 essential 8 fixed 8, 14 markers 112 molar 53, 62, 122 musical 61 politics 43, 46, 51, 59, 190 Tamu 132 n.3 identity-thinking 1, 24, 54, 57, 60 identity-to-come 54 ideology 23, 69 n.2, 90, 111, 113, 115, 120 Images of Home project, Australia 16, 192–8 affective and emotional capacity of 194, 196–8 collection and composition of everyday sounds 193–8 goal of 193, 195 and listening assemblage 195–8 notion of home 193 research method/design 192–3, 194 images of thought 8 immanence 2, 8, 16, 22, 23, 89, 130, 131, 134, 177, 178 imperceptible 10, 43–4, 46, 53, 64 improvisation 10, 18, 68, 179 contact 21, 205 n.1 experimental music 149–65 free 69 n.2, 150, 151, 161 jazz 67–82, 91 movement 24, 205–19 vocal 107–25 indeterminacy 10, 152, 170–2 individuation 17 infrasonic 174 inorganic life 170, 182–3, 185 Inorganized Ear 10, 171, 177, 180, 182–5 integrated dance theatre 207–8 intellect and intuition 77, 79, 82 intensity 45, 64, 73, 93, 111, 117, 124, 155, 169, 183 inter- and intra-textural art 52 intermediality 211 International Sign Language 34 internet music communities 18

INDEX

interpolation 161–3 intonation 54 intra-action 46 intuition 77, 79, 179 involution 76 Jackson, Michael 112f, 115f, 116–17 ‘Black or White’ 112f, 115f, 116–17 Jackson, Travis A. 68, 70 Jagger, Mick 116, 125 James, William 96, 176, 177 Järviluoma, Helmi 195 n.4 jazz 4, 24, 67–82, 158 avant-garde 69 n.2 “body rhythms” 70 categorizations 69 commercial appeal 69 n.2 and dance 72, 81 education 71, 80 experimental 68, 69–70, 79 free 68, 151 Gullah-Geechee rhythms 70, 75, 78 as high art 69 n.2, 71 history and 69–70, 78, 79–82 improvisation 68, 69, 91, 151, 158 influences 69 and Jim Crow 74 New Orleans 70, 71 periodization 69–70, 71 ‘Swing Era’ 71 traditional (trad) 69, 71–2, 74, 75, 78, 79, 81–2 tradition and race 67–70 Jim Crow laws 74, 75 Jimenez, Stephen 116 n.6 Johnson-Laird, Philip 191 joy, experiences of 191, 197, 206, 217 Joyrich, Lynne 113 Juba 70, 81 Jules, Gary 112f, 119f, 121 Juslin, Patrik N. 13 Kafka, Franz 54 Kagel, Mauricio 55, 60–2 Kahn, Douglas 196 Kaluli music 19, 134 n.9 Kaneda, Miki 162 Kapherer, Bruce 137–8, 143

235

Kaprow, Allan 173 Kassabian, Anahid 13 Kelly, Caleb 162, 163 Kember, Sarah 93 Kielian-Gilbert, Marianne 53, 64 kinaesthesia 208 n.4 kinecepts 208, 210, 215, 217, 218–19 kinestructs 208 kinetic collaborative theorizing 209–12 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 75 Kiser, Clyde Vernon 72 Kisliuk, Michelle 13, 100 Kittler, Friedrich 181–2 ‘knowing music’ 20, 21, 23 knowledge barrier 218 cultural 191 intuitive 206 n.3 production/formation 21, 208, 217 theoretical 208 Koestenbaum, Wayne 100 Kokkonen, Tuija 89, 100 Kontturi, Katve-Kaisa 1 Kooijman, Jaap 114 Koskoff, Ellen 11 Kramer, Lawrence 9, 15 Kristeva, Julia 3 Kubrich, Christina 152 Kyoto 154 LaBelle, Brandon 151, 152, 153 n.2, 163 n.5, 196 Ladd, Paddy 33 n.1 Laine, Tiina 209 Lambert, Adam (American Idol competition) audition 113, 125 finale 113, 114 finals 114, 116, 125 glam narratives 112–14 image/flamboyance/glam rock style 113, 121, 124, 125 performances/renditions 112f, 113–18, 115f, 119f, 122f queer spectacle/eroticism/desire/ subjectivity 21, 113–25 semi-finals 125 Lane, Harlan 36

236

language and discourse 151 and music 19, 54, 151, 189 sign 33–46 style of 54 use 98 Latour, Bruno 171 n.1 Led Zeppelin 112f, 122f, 123, 124 Lee, Okkyung 13, 150, 158–60, 161 Leibniz, Gottfried 198 Leonardi, Susan 100 Leppänen, Taru 1–24, 33–46 Leppert, Richard 15 Le Roy, Xavier 207 Lewis, Ann 193 Lewis, Samuel 97 liminality 137, 176–7 Lincoln Center, New York 80 Lindsay, Geoff 193 lineaments 59 lines of escape 59, 64 lines of flight 5, 18, 39, 56, 59, 111, 134, 137 lines of force 56, 63 Linstead, Stephen 132 listening acousmatic 182 active/attentive 174 Deep 179–82 definition of 173 distracted 178, 185 expanded 171–3, 179 hearing and 173–5 human/non-human audition 182 machinic mode of 182 modality of 178 openness of 10, 172, 173, 178 praxis of experimental music 171–85 unlearning habits 172, 175 voluntary/involuntary 179 listening assemblage 189–200 Locke, Peter 130 Lockwood, Annea 152 Loft Jazz 72 London Design Festival 88 Los Angeles 113, 152 Louisiana 68

INDEX

Löytönen, Teija 209 n.6 Lucier, Alvin 13, 20, 149–50, 152, 154–5, 157 Lucky Dragons 152 Lykke, Nina 137 lynching 116 Lyotard, Jean-François 3 Macarthur, Sally 5, 9, 10, 51–65 Macgregor Wise, J. 17, 99 machine abstract 60 desiring 59 machinic assemblage 19, 60–3, 92, 98, 99, 100, 101 researcher-cum-author 60 virtual 17, 131 machismo 115 Macpherson, Ben 91 macropolitics 35, 36, 52 madness 58, 61, 63 male chauvinism 115 male privilege 115 Malins, Peta 44, 51, 59 Manigault-Bryant, LeRhonda S. 71 Manning, Erin 3, 19, 88, 101, 181, 182, 207, 211, 212, 217 Marclay, Christian 158, 161, 162, 163 Marcus, George E. 18 Mardi Gras Indian tradition 69 n.2 marginalization 11, 20, 52, 64, 141 Marhaug, Lasse 158 Marks, John 4 Marsalis, Wynton 69, 71, 80 Marsh, Dave 115 Marxism 52 masculinity 36, 111, 114, 115, 118, 120, 122. See also rock masculinity Massumi, Brian 3, 10, 12, 14, 53, 58, 88, 90, 96, 108, 133 n.6, 138, 153 n.4, 155, 181, 182 master-composer 164 materialism/materiality 10, 15, 19, 22, 24, 35, 68, 150–1, 155, 164–5, 170–1, 182, 185, 199. See also new materialism Matory, J. Lorand 70, 71

INDEX

Mattila, Ilkka 35 Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock 176 May, Todd 45, 108, 109 McCartney, Paul 121 McClary, Susan 9, 15, 21, 100 McCormack, Derek 3, 207 McIntosh County Shouters 72 McLeod, Norma 129 McMullen, Tracy 179 McNeil, William H. 138 mediation 16–17, 90, 93, 109 meditations 176, 179, 180 medium 10, 35, 61, 69, 133 n.6, 153 n.4, 161–4, 170–3 Meizel, Katherine 112–13, 114, 117 Melbourne, Australia 192, 194 melisma 114, 120, 123, 124 melodic line 87, 151 melodic structures 69 n.2 melody 35, 114, 115, 116, 120, 121, 124, 125, 136 n.16, 181, 191 meme 115 Menon, Vinay 40 Mercury, Freddie 113, 124–5 Merlino, Dean 193 Merriam, Alan P. 129 metal 113, 114 metamorphosis 56 metaphor 24, 100, 180, 181 metaphysics 150, 154, 157, 178 meter 67, 69, 73, 76, 78, 87 Metheny, Eleanor 208 microorganisms 91 micropolitics 7, 35, 36, 51–65 Middleton, Richard 8, 15, 23, 131 milieu 2, 5, 8, 12, 14, 20, 67, 113, 132–5, 139, 141, 142–3, 153–4, 157, 160, 171, 179 Miller, Karl Hagstrom 74 mind and body 8, 12, 14, 22, 40, 95, 99, 151, 157, 164, 177, 179, 197 minoritarian 11, 22, 45, 54, 64 Miracles, The 112f, 118, 119 misfits 42 Mississippi Delta 80 Modernism 5, 129, 171 modes of projection 87

237

modulation 94, 138, 159, 180 Mohr, Hope 196 Moisala, Pirkko 1–24, 129–43 molar/molecular 17–18, 35–6, 38, 43, 45, 46, 52, 53, 56–60, 62, 63, 64, 110–11, 122, 134–5, 140 monism 157, 165, 177 Monson, Ingrid 9, 68, 70 Mori, Ikue 158 Morton, Jelly Roll 71 movement improvisation 24, 205–19 Mullarkey, John 36 multiplicity 2, 7, 14, 18, 52, 54, 61, 63, 91, 111, 131, 134–5, 177–8 Mumford, Stan R. 134 Murphie, Andrew 90 Murray, Robin 117 Muse 112f, 122, 123 music actual 109 art 4, 5–6, 15, 24, 61, 63, 96, 129, 171, 172, 218 as art of listening 33 as becoming 2, 23, 24, 40–1, 109 and body 129–43, 149–65, 205–19 ‘certainty of knowing’ 21 and cinema 4 classical 1, 4, 15, 69 n.2, 80, 87, 89, 95, 110, 150, 158 and cosmos 5, 37 as culture 15, 21, 22 and dance 21, 72, 80, 81, 129–43, 205–19 Deleuzian-Guattarian 2, 4–5, 34, 37, 43, 81, 124, 171, 184–5 DIY spaces 150, 151 drone 151, 180, 182 electronic 151 n.1, 179 and emotion 13, 181, 190–1 experimental 2, 10, 13, 56, 69, 149–65, 169–85 folk 69 n.2, 97 funding bodies 51 funk 113–14, 120 Gurung 129–43 hip hop 11, 33–46, 151 jazz 67–82 Kaluli 19, 134 n.9

238

INDEX

‘knowing’ 20, 21, 23 language and 19, 54, 151, 189 mainstream 151 meaning and function of 172 n.3 nature and 19 norms and conventions 151 opera 87–103 painting and 170, 184 popular 2, 15, 24, 69 n.2, 73–4, 107–25, 151 and race 67–82 rap 24, 34–5, 37, 41, 42 real-world problems in 52 as text 23, 52 -theatre 59, 60–3 as verb 172, 190 women’s 51–65, 129–43 musical ethnography 2, 11 musical expression 111, 134 musical instruments 14, 60, 63, 117, 139, 158, 210 n.7. See also specific entries musical performances affective power of 138–9 as assemblage 131, 139, 142–3 embodied skills and transformative vitality of 139–40, 141, 142–3 as events 131–2, 141 rituality of 137–9 of Tamu women/Āma Samuha 132–43 visuality of 33–46 musical persona 21, 108, 109, 110 musical structure 4, 55, 94 music and sound studies areas/branches of 3–6, 13 cultural studies 23–4 Deleuzian-Guattarian inspired 1–24 ethnographic methodology 129–43 new ethics and politics 20–2 non-audist methodologies 33–46 music industry 17, 42 musicking in d/Deaf cultures 33–46 Deleuzian-Guattarian concepts 6–20 human/non-human agents 43 Lambert’s 21, 107–25

in movement 21, 205–19, 210 n.7 process 149–65, 169–85 Signmark’s 33–46 Small’s concept 2, 36, 39, 110, 172, 173, 190 Tamu 129–43 music schools 17, 209 n.5 music theory 54 musique concrète 19, 182 mysticism 69 n.2 Nancy, Jean-Luc 173–4 natural attitude 174, 175 natural locales 9 Nepali music 2, 14, 24, 129–43 Nesbitt, Nick 4, 91 Neumark, Norie 91 neurodiversity 181–2 Newley, Anthony 122 n.13 new materialism 18, 68, 81, 92, 100, 150–1 New Orleans 68, 69 n.2, 70, 71 New York 68, 70, 72, 80, 176 New York City 68, 210 n.7 New York Times 176 n.4 Nietzsche, Friedrich 8, 155 Nigianni, Chrysanthi 4 Nitta, Michiko. See BurtonNitta noise 151, 152, 158, 161, 177, 182, 185 background 177, 197, 198 health impacts of 193 n.3 noise music 151 noise rock 150 Noland, Carrie 139 nomad art 38 nomad thought 58, 59, 60, 62 non-anthropocentrism 13, 89, 99, 103, 149, 156 non-audist methodologies 33–46 non-musical 52 norm 11, 45, 53, 55, 59, 61, 100, 108, 111, 135, 142, 151, 158 notes/notation, musical 15, 21, 78, 88, 124, 152, 180 n.6, 181 ‘noticing musicking’ 20, 21 ‘not yet’ 53 ‘not yet knowing’ 149

INDEX

Novak, David 199 Nyman, Michael 151–2, 153 n.2 Oatley, Keith 191 Obama, Barack 116 n.6 occult 80 oeuvre 7, 14 offbeat 116 Officer, Australia 192, 193, 194, 199 Ohanwe, Chike 35 Ojala, Pirjo 209 Point (short film) 209–12, 214, 218, 219 Oliveros, Pauline 10, 152, 171, 179–82 ‘Auralizing the Sonosphere’ 180 n.6 Olkowski, Dorothea 122 ontology 4, 5, 12, 15, 22, 35, 90, 103, 155, 165, 190 open-endedness 8, 152, 157 opera 18, 60, 61, 87–103, 130 n.2 oppression 56, 81, 111 optical music recognition program 163 n.5 orchestra 17, 107, 150 organic life 96, 183 ornamentation 114 oscillator drones 182 O’Sullivan, Simon 1, 3 overpopulation 89 Padden, Carol 33 n.1 painting 169, 170, 184 Pan-Africanism 80 Parikka, Jussi 3, 182, 211 parody 55, 58, 61, 64 passive synthesis 183, 184 Patton, Paul 17, 18, 131 Peabody Essex Museum 152 Pedelty, Mark 19 ‘people to come, a’ 54, 123, 129–43 perception 2, 7, 88, 91, 100, 109, 130, 138, 143, 174–83, 193, 195–8 percussion 34, 39, 118, 121, 124, 125, 162 petites perceptions 198 phenomenology 41, 174, 175, 179 Philadelphia 72 Phillips, John 196

239

philosophy of action 77 philosophy of the real 77 phonocentrism 42 phonograph 40 photo-elicitation 193 n.3 photography 74, 169 photosynthesis 89, 99, 172 n.2 piano 40, 121, 153, 162, 185 Piekut, Benjamin 171 n.1 Pile, Steve 190 Pillow, Wanda 3 Pisters, Patricia 3 pitch 74, 95, 97, 117, 119, 121, 125, 162, 197 pizzicatos 60 place and time 42 plane of composition 177 plane of immanence 8, 175, 177–8 plane of organization 178 plane of transcendence 9 planes, molar/molecular 17, 110–11 Plant, Robert 124, 125 Pleasant, David 22, 68–82 career 72, 79–80 dance and choreography 72, 81 and Deleuzian-Guattarian concepts of rhythm and time 75, 76–9, 82 early life 68, 71 on groove 67, 73–5, 78, 79 Gullah-Geechee heritage 69–75, 78, 80, 81 intellectual method 68, 69, 70, 72, 76, 77–9, 82 notions of time 69, 72–4, 76, 78, 79, 82 polyrhythm style 72–3, 74, 78 Riddimathon! 81 views on race 80–2 pleasure, musical 44, 109–10, 113, 125, 143, 155 Plutarch 206 n.2 poetic improvisation 154 point of motion 211, 215, 216, 217 point of view 208, 209, 215, 217, 218 police violence 74 polyrhythm 69–79, 82 Pope, Rebecca 100

240

INDEX

popular music 2, 15, 24, 69 n.2, 73–4, 107–25, 151 history 113–14 Porter, Eric 70 postcolonialism 52, 129 n.1 Poster, Mark 4 posthumanism 19 poststructuralism 8, 68 potentialities 1, 5, 10, 22, 58, 62, 100, 109, 111, 118, 122 n.14, 123, 125, 139, 142, 177–8, 212 pragmatics 98, 184 prison 74–5 privatization 17 Probyn, Elspeth 191 process philoso phy 2, 3, 20, 90, 96 process/processuality 2, 6, 16, 23, 151, 152 propositions 7, 172, 214 psychedelic rock 113–14 psychoanalysis 8 punk 114, 152 Queen 113 queer eroticism 111, 112f, 114, 115f, 117–18, 119f, 122f musicology 24 revolution 108 studies 7 theory 4, 118 n.9 transversal 107–25 race 4, 8, 45, 110 categorizations of 100 creative dimensions of 68 history of 70, 81–2 and jazz 67–82 and police violence 74 temporal dimensions of 22, 68, 74–5 Radano, Ronald 80 radical freedom 69 n.2 Radio Nepal 136 n.16 ragas 69 n.2 Rahaim, Matthew 101 Rainer, Yvonne 207 rap 24, 34–5, 37, 41, 42

Rappaport, Joanne 209 n.6 Raunig, Gerald 123 Read, Alan 89 ‘real, the’ 77, 175 reality 7, 9, 16, 23, 91, 96, 101, 170, 178 reality TV 2, 21, 107, 117 n.8. See also specific entries Rebelo, Pedro 39 reciprocity 89, 91, 93, 99, 133, 134, 142, 190 recognition 36, 43, 53, 55, 87 recorded music 41, 72, 158–60 recorded sound 161–4 Redner, Gregg 4 reductionism 115 n.4, 177 refrain 37, 115, 117, 121, 123, 133, 136 regimes of signs 98. See also nonreferential regime of signs rehearsal 39, 109, 130 n.2 relational field 181 relationality 3, 10, 23, 38, 96, 129, 130 n.2, 134 n.8, 151, 152, 157, 164–5, 177 relational movement 211–12 relations of exteriority 18, 91, 92–7 repetition 5, 8, 79, 108 n.1, 121, 133, 139, 153, 183–4 repression 20, 58, 59 reproduction 15–16, 22, 54, 74, 75, 161, 163, 183 researcher-cum-author machine 60 research topics 4, 24, 207 resemblance 1, 57, 99, 205, 206, 216 resistance 54, 59, 107, 108, 110, 111 Resnick, Brian 75 resonance 99, 150, 158, 164, 170 Restless Dance Company, Australia 208 restraint 61 reterritorialization 5, 17, 114, 125, 184 returning 8, 143 rhizome 5, 7, 18, 68–70, 72, 76–9, 118 rhyme 35, 37, 40 rhythm 7, 40, 67, 70, 72–3, 118, 124, 133, 149, 161–3, 181, 191, 198, 208 n.4 anti-racist theory of 75

INDEX

vs. groove 73–4, 75 Gullah-Geechee 67–82 rhythm and blues 113, 118, 120 Rice, Carla 208 Riddimathon! 81 Riley, Terry In C 153 Ringrose, Jessica 4, 20 Ring Shout 70, 72, 81 ritual 72, 73, 81, 97, 101, 130, 132, 134, 137–9, 142, 143, 210 n.7 Robichaux, Dilana 112f, 115, 117 Robinson, Smokey 112f, 118, 119 rock masculinity 112f, 115f, 118, 119f, 120, 122, 123, 124 rock music 111, 112f, 113, 115, 120, 122f, 151 and eroticism 118 n.9 Roediger, David 68 Rogers, Matt 97, 98, 102 Rogers, Tara 153 n.2 Rolling Stones 112f, 114, 115–16 Romanticism 129, 171 royalties 41 rubatos 120 ‘ruins’ 122 Russo, Nick 72, 74 Saarinen, Tero 211 Saka, Erkan 18 Sakakeeny, Matt 199 Saldanha, Arun 3, 67, 68, 81 Savat, David 4 Savran, David 36 Sawyer, Keith 96 Schaefer, R. Murray 195–6 Scheer, Edward 90 Scherzinger, Martin 213 n.8 schizoanalysis 59–60, 64–5 schizophrenia 59, 62, 69, 70, 170 Schrimshaw, Will 43 Schwartzman, Madeline 102 sci-fi 88 score 4, 16, 74, 96, 110, 152, 176 Seeger, Anthony 131 Segal, Dave 153 segmentarity 134, 135 segregation of sound 74, 82

241

self, the 11, 19, 44, 61, 191 semiotics 7, 92, 98, 131, 139, 150, 165 sensation 1, 4, 23, 39–42, 95, 109, 139, 143, 169, 172, 173, 176, 177, 183, 190, 200, 208 n.4 senses 6, 7, 12, 13, 37–40, 180, 182, 196 serialism 61, 62, 80 sexism 115 sexuality 8, 9, 11, 21, 100, 107–25 Shakespeare, Tom 44 n.4 shamanism 134 n.7, 135, 136 n.14 Shaviro, Steven 3 Sheer, Edward 61 Shelemay, Kay Kaufman 9, 131 Shepard, Matthew 116–17 Shouse, Eric 12 signals, electrical 39 sign language 33–46 vs. spoken language 37 Signmark (Marko Vuoriheimo) 11, 33–46 authorship 41–4 childhood memory 34 composing process and style 37, 38 fans and audiences 34, 38, 40, 42, 46 haptic acts of musicking 39–41 multilingual shows and performances 34–5 promoting rights of people with disabilities 36 use of sign language 34–5, 37–8, 40, 41–2 visual aspects of performances 38 silence 117, 120, 124, 163, 174, 175–8 Simondon, Gilbert 10 Simone, Nina 112f, 122–3 singularity 14, 20, 23, 90, 179 Sitter, Kathleen C. 208 slavery 70, 81 ‘slip-sliders’ 60 Sloboda, John 13 Small, Christopher 2, 36, 39, 46, 110, 129, 150, 165 n.6, 172, 173, 190, 194, 198, 216 Smart, Mary Ann 100

242

INDEX

Smith, Susan J. 190, 194 smooth space 208–10, 212–15, 219 solo 113, 115, 121, 124, 125, 154, 158 sonic arts 150, 165 sonic food enhancement 97 sonic gags 9, 60 sonic materialism 64, 150, 155, 165 sonic medium 10 Sony 161 soul music 119 sound and affect 149–50, 154, 158–65, 189–200 composition of 38–9 definition of 35, 39, 190 digital 162, 163, 193 environmental 195–6 film 182 imperceptible 43–4 and light 38 and listening 173–5, 189–200 materiality of 179–82, 199 mid-range register 35 and movement 38, 205–19 and music, Attali’s concept 189–90 and noise 152 omnipresence of 175–6, 177 as pressure 170, 173 qualities of 198 recorded 161–4 and silence 175–8 and sound-making 150 and space 38, 39, 170, 179 and structure 178 and temporality 170 and vibration 35, 39–41, 159, 165, 170 sound art 16, 24, 39, 150, 152, 158, 162, 173, 192–3, 195, 196, 198, 199–200 sound designer 193, 194, 196, 198 sound-event 170, 172, 178, 185 sound installation 153 sound objects 178 sound processings 18 sound-proof 175 Sounds Absurd Concert 60

soundscapes 18, 43, 87, 133, 173, 176, 177, 195–6 sound studies. See also music and sound studies hearing and listening 36, 39 touch and hearing 39 visuality and hearing 37–9 sound system 40 sound technologies 40, 42 South Carolina 68, 70 Southern Chinese Sign Language 34, 37 South Korean music 158 space-time 2, 14, 76, 77, 118, 135, 138, 143, 170, 178, 179 n.5, 183, 185 spectacle 21, 63, 107–25 speed 19, 38, 45, 78, 118–21, 141, 156, 162, 177, 214 Spinks, Lee 8 Spinoza, Baruch and affect 13, 20, 138, 155, 164–5 and body 13, 149, 150, 154–60, 165, 191, 206–7, 214 common notions 206–7, 211, 214 mind-body parallelism 164 sonic materialism 165 spirituality 70, 80, 134, 183 Spivak, Gyatri Chakravorty 129 n.1 splintered extension 209–16, 219 St. Pierre, Elizabeth 3 stage lightning 38 standardization 52 Steintrager, James 197 Stengers, Isabelle 184 Stenros, Nuppu 37 Steppenwolf 112f, 119f, 120, 121 Sterne, Jonathan 35, 42 Stewart, Kathleen 20 Stirr, Anna 136 n.17 Stockhausen 61 Stokes, Martin 9 Storr, Merl 4 straight/gay binary 107, 113, 116 n.5 striated space 208–10, 212–15, 219 Strickland, Simon 134, 135 stuttering 162, 163 subjectification 17

INDEX

subjectivity(ies) 6, 11, 19, 35, 42, 43, 98, 108–9, 111, 114, 117, 118, 121, 125, 155, 172, 173, 183, 196 Subotnik, Rose 15 subversion 108 subwoofers 40 Surin, Kenneth 52 sustainability 18, 94, 95, 100, 103, 134 sustained-tone reverberation studies 179 Swiboda, Marcel 4, 68, 199 Switzerland 70 symbiote culture 97, 102 syncopation 116, 120 synthesis 63, 183–4 Szendy, Peter 178, 185 tactile sensations 39–40, 173, 184, 219 tactile signing 37 n.3 Tamus/Tamu village, Klinu, Nepal Āma Samuha, women’s musical performances 135–42 development projects 134, 137 ethnography of 132–5 gender restrictions 135, 140, 141, 142 money collection via music-making 134, 137 musical activities 133–5 religion and cosmology 134, 141 soundscape 133 tape recorder 179–80 taps/tapping 60, 210, 219 Tchaikovsky 163 techno 103, 152 temperature 150, 154, 205 tempo 116, 120, 121, 124, 125, 138, 177, 198 tenor 117, 119, 120 Tensta, Adam 34–5 territorialization 17, 115, 185 tessitura 87 text 62, 63 Thanem, Torkild 132 theatre of the absurd 55 theosophy 80 Thomaidis, Konstantinos 91

243

Thomas, Nathan 158, 159 Thompson, Marie 13, 20, 149–65 Thomson, Marie 138 ‘thousand tiny sexes, a’ 55 Thrift, Nigel 190 Tiainen, Milla 1–24, 87–103, 211 Tiilikainen, Anneli 21, 205, 209–19 timbre 54, 87, 117, 158, 160, 181, 198 time-object 152 time/temporality Bergsonian 73, 76–7 Deleuzian-Guattarian 72, 76 and duration 76–7 evolutionary 77 linear notion of 77, 79 Pleasant’s theory 68–9, 76, 78, 82 rhythm and 72, 75, 76–9 and space 2, 14, 76, 77, 118, 135, 138, 143, 170, 178, 179 n.5, 183, 185 Titon, Jeff 23, 129 togetherness 91, 134, 138, 139, 142 Tokyo Fluxus movement 161 tone 54, 89, 95, 119, 179, 191 Tone, Yasunao 13, 150, 161–4 total sound-space 177 tourism 133 trance music 68 transcendent plane of organization 178 transformation 17, 45, 93, 94, 108, 137, 139–43, 151, 155, 181 transgression 95, 111, 143 transversality 107–25 Trower, Shelley 40 Truax, Barry 195 n.4 Tubman, Harriet 75 Turetsky, Phil 208 n.4 Turner, Victor 137 Tyler, Steven 125 ultrasonic 174 underground dance music culture, New York City 210 n.7 unison 60 United States jazz studies/culture in 68, 80 popular music history 114

244

INDEX

race and racism in 68, 70, 74–6, 78, 80, 114, 116–17 unsound 174 urbanization 192, 195 n.4 Väätäinen, Hanna 1–24, 205–19 Väliaho, Pasi 3 van der Tuin, Iris. 46 n.5, 151 Vanhanen, Janne 10, 169–85 Vannini, Phillip 190 Vare, Robert 114 variation 2, 5, 6, 9, 18, 38, 45, 54, 58, 60, 114, 173, 178, 211, 215 Veblen, Kari K. 138 vibrant matter 19, 92 vibration 2, 10, 11, 23, 24, 35, 39–43, 153–4, 159–60, 165, 170–1 vibrato 13, 40, 54, 153 n.4, 170, 184 Victoria, Australia 192 Victoria and Albert Museum, London 88, 99 Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (VicHealth) 192 videos 34, 38, 90, 99, 209 n.6, 210, 216 virtual/virtuality 2, 4, 10, 13, 17, 45, 58, 65, 68, 81, 100, 108–10, 125, 131, 133 n.6, 137–8, 142–3, 173, 177–8, 191, 197, 198, 215, 216 visual art 38 visual disability 213 visual gags 9, 55, 60, 62 vitality 19–20, 141 vital materialism 19 vital materiality 19 vocal improvisation 114 voyeurism 118 Vuoriheimo, Marko. See Signmark

Walser, Robert 115 n.4 Warner, Daniel 151, 152 Warner Music 34 waves and particles 181 Western music 1, 4, 22, 43, 44 Whitehead, Alfred N. 96 whiteness 36, 74 Wild Cherry 112f, 119f, 120 will, the 20 Wolfe, Cary 19 Wolfe, Patrick 68 woman/women becoming 9–10, 44, 45, 51–65, 140 empowered position of 137, 141 music/dance performances 51–65, 87–103, 129–43, 205–19 stereotypical images of 53 subjugation of 51, 53, 55, 57, 62 in traditional society 135 Wong, Deborah 79 ‘wonky’ glissandi 60 Wood, Nichola 190 Woodward, Ashley 56 World Soundscape Project 195 n.4 world view, indigenous 134 n.7, 181 Wyoming 116 Xenakis 152, 215, 216, 218 Yeh, C. Spencer 158 Young, La Monte 182 YouTube 53 n.1, 90 Zepke, Stephen 173 Zylinska, Joanna 93