Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music (review)

This collection brings together essays by (mostly) music scholars who extend the work of philosopher Gilles Deleuze (often writing with Félix Guattari) into music. As the editors note, perhaps the biggest obstacle to reading music scholarship is the highly specialized vocabulary of music theory. Chapters by non-music scholars are generally most accessible, while music scholars handle Deleuzian concepts relative to music with varying degrees of finesse. In the opening chapter Christopher Hasty takes up the problem of music’s resistance to representation, exploring Deleuze’s image of thought as a means of thinking, hearing, and performing music in new ways. Brian Hulse’s project would create, in contradistinction to traditional approaches, a minor music theory based on Deleuze’s concept of difference. Sean Higgins returns to Deleuze’s image of thought to offer an uncommonly provocative and productive discussion of noise in music studies. Michael Gallope’s chapter (fourth in the book) is the first to take up Deleuze’s concept(s) of music directly. Gallope extends Hulse’s discussion of Deleuzian repetition and argues that tensions in Deleuze’s writings related to ethics and those on metaphysics lead to a bifurcation in his writing on music. Martin Scherzinger also focuses on tensions in Deleuze and Guattari’s writing on music, arguing that their use of Pierre Boulez’s modernist music undermines their political project critiquing late capitalism. Amy Cimini takes up Deleuze’s musical thought in terms of Spinoza’s work on mind–body relations, positing potentialities of music listening as an ethics of joy. Arguing music as a Deleuzian war machine, Jean-Bodefroy Bidima draws on Deleuzian thought in terms of both methodology and content to explore Deleuze’s concepts of intensity and the event. Nick Nesbitt, with clarity and passion, also approaches the Deleuzian musical event, evincing intimate familiarity with and sensitivity to jazz in its many nuances. Carrying this Deleuzian line to his writings on sensation and art (music), Judy Lochhead analyses Wolfgang Rihm’s composition Am Horizont in terms of what she calls a logic of edge. By contrast, Marianne Kielian-Gilbert’s densely theoretical analysis deploys a singular reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s work, drawing on feminist writers to consider processes of ‘becoming music’ through a variety of musical examples from J. S. Bach to Mary Chapin Carpenter. Bruce Quaglia places Luciano Berio’s compositions and his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in dialogue with Deleuze’s writings, as he develops a minoritarian epistemological framework for music analysis in the Deleuzian sense of what music can do. In the final chapter, startling for its striking evocation of the nomadic culture and music of the Bashkirs in juxtaposition with Deleuze’s philosophical figuration of the nomad, Ildar Khannanov deftly analyses Western melodic line related to its sedentary nature, highlighting Chopin’s music for nomadic strategies that ‘transcend’ sedentariness. Together, the essays demonstrate potentialities of Deleuzian concepts to proliferate innovative responses to Deleuze in musical studies. A chapter featuring two scholars (one from music studies, one not) jointly addressing a Deleuzian concept and music might have extended the volume’s audience more productively beyond music studies.