Is There a Deleuzian Musical Work?

Abstract

Is There a Deleuzian Musical Work? Michael Gallope "And in that one moment in time I will feel eternity" ?Whitney Houston, "One Moment in Time" SINCE THE WORK OF French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is so popular among many different circles of themusical avant-garde, a new reader to his work might expect to find a full-scale philosophy of music in his books, rifewith passionate details. But, upon broadly surveying his work, it ishard not to be a bit disappointed. One usually discovers that, despite Deleuze's incredible ability to touch on nearly every academic discipline in some way or another, his best moments are usually very philosophical. That said, I do not think thismeans his philosophy has nothing to offermusicians and musicologists. Perhaps specifically musi cal problems can be unearthed and wrested out only if we arm ourselves with questions native to musicology, aiming them towards what 94 PerspectivesofNew Music Deleuze does best: philosophy. We might ask: are there Deleuzian per spectives on musicological problems? In this article, I try to find something like a "musical work" from the perspective of Deleuze's philosophical orientation. But, since this thesis has no easy answers, I have kept the tide of this article in the form of a question, and I have structured my analysis as an unfolding series. I will begin summarizing well-known formulations of the musical work: a Platonist view explored by Peter Kivy and a historicist view explored by Lydia Goehr.1 These are not exhaustive inquires. They suffice only as points of comparison to the different iterations of a "Deleuzian musical work." I then proceed with a bare-bones analysis of Deleuze's philosophy. Finally, in the remaining sections, I will introduce increasingly complex and specific Deleuzian concepts to the problem of music. Readers expecting an objective or empirical study of Deleuze's writings on music will not find it here. Such a project strikesme as neither feasible nor wise; a good deal of variation and inconsistency crops up inDeleuze's work, especially when the question at hand is not particularly native to his thought. So I tryto chart something ofmy own path through this problem, retaining an external analytical perspective. I think this is the best way to reveal the difficulties I thinkDeleuze has, himself, inmaintaining a fullyconsistent position. And of course, I have not undertaken this project to defend Deleuze's philosophy as a better path formusical thought. I am justwriting an exercise to turn over the problem of themusical work again. 1.A Platonist View A Platonist, or transcendent, view of themusical work insists thatworks exist in some way ideally and eternally independent of human listeners or musicians. In this view, taken up occasionally by Peter Kivy, themusi cal work itself doesn't have essential relations with extra-musical, empirical, conditional, cultural, historical, or worldly, contingent situa tions. Musical works simply acquire a fully immaterial dimension once they have been created. More radically, one could argue that musical works are always already immaterial, and composers and musicians merely discover them.2 Kivy does not offer a positive explanation of this transcendent view of the musical work; instead he defends musical "Platonism" from critiques. But this does not prevent us from attempting to define what such a Platonist position entails. The Platonist view, we could say, Is There a Deleuzian MusicalWork? 95 argues that themost real aspect of anymusic is our idea of it, since the idea of the musical work iswhat allows the work to persist eternally, across different situations. That is, following the Platonic doctrine that the thought idea is the purest form of truth, the Platonist position holds that the music can transcend particular performances and situations simply by being thought as pure form. The differentwords Kivy uses to refer to this idea (a "universal," a "type," a "kind," or a "sound structure") all reflect this Platonic immateriality that names the pure truthofmusic's existence.3 The Platonist musical work, which is really the musical work qua idea, can be a difficult position to defend. Kivy is aware of these challenges. The Platonist view needs many qualifications. Kivy writes of the ideal musical work: It may not be true for improvisations...