music analysis volume 33 issue 3 2014

Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt (eds), Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and theTheory and Philosophy of Music (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). xvii + 288 pp. 65.ISBN 978-0-7546-6773-5 (hb).

As Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt say in their introduction, Gilles Deleuze wroteabout or through music a great deal, and his influence on musicians, fromBrian Ferneyhough to Mouse on Mars, has been striking. Yet musicologysresponse has been, for the most part, muted. To be clear: it is precisely musi-cology which is at stake here. The disciplines of philosophy, cultural studies andcomparative literature have produced a number of volumes in which the ques-tion of what a Deleuzian music or a Deleuzian approach to music might looklike has been raised.1 Although three of the contributors to the present collection Jean-Godefroy Bidima, Sean Higgins and Nesbitt would not be recognised(and would presumably not describe themselves) as musicologists, the othernine certainly are, ranging from (then-) doctoral candidates (Amy Cimini andMichael Gallope) to as senior a scholar as Christopher Hasty. The case forinterest from across the discipline is well made in the list of contributors alone.

In any case, Hulse and Nesbitt present their contribution precisely in theseterms: what can Deleuzian thought do for us musicologists? What can wemusicologists do for Deleuzian thought? And where does Deleuzes particularinterest in music cause fissures, even ruptures, in an otherwise apparently con-sistent philosophical system? This last is perhaps the most striking issue, not leastbecause it is in other, similar areas that Deleuze can be at his most engaging andilluminating but still seem to come a cropper in philosophical terms. Whenreading the two volumes on film, my own feeling, at least, was that I learnt atleast as much about Deleuze the movie buff as I did about the ways in whichphilosophers and proper philosophical concepts Deleuze, Henri Bergson,Zeno, motion, representation, time and image are marshalled in this context.2

And of course the experience is none the worse for it. Yet, just because of this,its in this territory that Deleuze is most vulnerable to being treated just as hehimself treated the histories of his forebears: What got me by during thatperiod was conceiving of the history of philosophy as a kind of ass-fuck, or, whatamounts to the same thing, an immaculate conception. I imagined myselfapproaching an author from behind and giving him a child that would indeed behis but would nonetheless be monstrous.3 Perhaps the most monstrous thing inthis volume, however, is also its most urgent concern. As the editors stress intheir introduction, One of the problems the field of music studies has faced is itsseeming isolation from the larger scholarly world. Much has been imported, butwith less reciprocity. And what has been brought in from other fields has often

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been selected for its use-value (pp. xvxvi). It is evident that this is not themusicology the editors desire: No longer are boundaries between music andthe body, the body and culture, culture and politics, politics and environment,or those between music theory, musicology, and ethnomusicology, or thosebetween various cultural practices, or any number of other jurisdictional distinc-tions to dictate the form and flows of music and musical enquiry (p. xvi). To thisextent, the volume sets out to do violence to music studies, but only in order tomake music come to itself, to produce, in Deleuzian manner, properly musicalconcepts, which in turn make music studies better able to speak more widely.These, then, are the ambitious standards against which the editors ask theirvolume to be judged.

The opening three essays Hasty on the idea of music, Hulse on musicaldifference and Higgins on noise are variously concerned with DeleuzesDifference and Repetition, as well as the later recurrence of those ideas in histhird collaborative volume with Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.4 Hastyneatly places musics problem at centre stage. To the degree to which art is,in the Platonic sense, mimetic, music is second-rate: it represents only weakly.Yet, since Deleuze argues that problems are Ideas in the process of theirconcretisation problems are, in a sense, the events of Ideas this failure ofmusic to do what it, as art, ought to, becomes (axiomatically, in fact) produc-tive. Rather than try to solve the problem, Hasty wonders whether musics failureto resolve itself to become fully formed, reminding the reader that to per-formis always to form more fully is a stroke of good fortune. In an analysis ofChopins Scherzo for Piano in E Major, Op. 54, Hasty takes an approachfounded on just this process of broken, failing becoming. To this extent, theapproach to music is paradigmatic of a coming to know Ideas, just as it is of Ideascoming to themselves: analysis has here become an empirical experiment.Perhaps this is what it always is, of course; Hasty does not try to answer thequestion. Yet the performative staging of analytical experimentation andfailure is compelling.5 Of course, what Hasty does in such a performance is toexpose the (productive) failure of analytical discourse to fix the identity of amusical work, thereby revealing the difference (in Deleuzian terms) theunfixable musical difference which any musical work, even the smallest token,exhibits.

Precisely this nexus of ideas is at the heart of Hulses contribution, whichstems from the Deleuzian critique of prior philosophical concepts of difference.Almost all of these rely implicitly or explicitly on difference from some fixedpoint: an identity. Deleuzian difference, that deployed by Hulse, is about dif-ference without identity: this pure difference is, indeed, precisely what Deleuzeterms the virtual, signaled in the present volumes title. Like Hasty, Hulse toostresses the way in which such a conception does not require, for instance, thereto be any ground, any original back to which to refer. Nothing, in this sense, isa priori indeed, other than relation, difference and the lines of flight whichconstruct an assemblage, even one of differing internal weights and intensities.

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As Hulse insists, difference thus conceived would pose questions for any theo-retical approach to music, given conceptions of music which focus, at least someof the time, on musical difference as articulated through contrast or correspond-ence: this is louder than that, this softer, this interval wider. Difference inDeleuzian terms (and, for that matter, in Deleuzo-Guattarian ones, a distinctionwhich the volume does not always make) is not properly metrical. Instead, insuch a conception, difference must precede identity; if identity exists, it is asecondary quality, a product of pure difference. The problem for the analyst,then, in Hulses terms, is that a properly Deleuzian approach to music couldhave little truck with, say, a Schenkerian background or middleground. Even ifthe analysts interest might be in the particular ways in which the middlegroundunfolds, where the slippages against the Ursatz occur, such an approach stillnecessarily models which is to say, measures the analysis against theSchenkerian identity: difference is subservient to identity in any such approach,Hulse seems, with Deleuze, to say. The criticism has been levelled before, ofcourse. Yet, framed in Deleuzian terms, the idea that difference might bemade primary in an analytical approach offers perhaps surprising alternatives.Although I find Hulses insistence that [h]earing music in its properly mutant,diagonal mode through analysis means, above all, to connect with it intuitively which can only be done directly, immediately a little touchy-feely, it doesntdetract from the useful reformulation of the question he poses, which is to askagain what ought to be included and what excluded from the analysts purview(this last broadly conceived). Though it seems to me that many, perhaps most,analysts would now probably be a little uncomfortable with the idea of the musicitself (and would assuredly not regard it as coterminous with a score), thereminder that at a certain level repetition and difference are not to be sunderedfrom one another is doubtless a valuable one (p. 47). For all that, I find the callto arms of Hulses essay excessively utopian:

Everything is hybrid. Separate theories for separate repertoires produce falseproblems and false solutions. What is required is a decentered, global theory, aworld music theory, based no longer in preestablished identities and categories,but in process, connection, and improvisation. (p. 48; emphasis in original)

Sympathetic though I may be, I am also reminded that, when Deleuze andGuattari say that [t]he orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing ofthe wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image,6 even if the orchid isbecoming-wasp and the wasp becoming-orchid, what that might feel like if onewere a wasp is surely rather different from how it would feel if one were anorchid.7

A fine piece from Higgins closes off this opening triptych of essays, providingan admittedly non-musical analytical description of the way in which noisemight usefully be conceptualised as what is left over in listening: Noise is theabsolute difference of empirical sound in excess of sound a listener may arrest by

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any model of listening (p. 53). Indeed, although my own reading of the chapterpositions its concerns as someway distant from analysis as such, it is quiteplausible that Hulse might point to this essay as an example of just the sort ofanalysis he is looking for, given its overt focus on the register of a listenersengagement with empirical sound in which all models of listening are deployed,the only position from which one can find their blank spots (p. 53). In Deleuzianterms, since [t]he true act of thought ... is driven by the violence of that whichis unrecognizable to common sense, it follows that [t]rue thought is a transfer ofnoise (p. 54; emphasis in original).

In his contribution Martin Scherzinger posits polemically, to be sure thatBoulezian thought dwells to such an extent within Deleuzo-Guattarian thoughtthat one might substitute the composers name for the philosophers in MichelFoucaults famous (and doubtless tongue-in-cheek) claim that [p]erhaps oneday this century will be known as Deleuzian.8 Scherzinger conceives of thewhole of A Thousand Plateaus as a study in inter-semiotic transposition, amal-gamating the conceptual and sensual modalities (gestures, images, rhythms,sounds) of modernist music and those of philosophy (p. 108). He goes on topropose that the volumes informing technical principle was the synthesizer.The reader should, I think, be wary of reading A Thousand Plateaus in only thisway, but it is certainly worth recollecting that Deleuze and Guattari themselvescharacterise philosophy in the contemporary world as a thought synthesizer(p. 109) and that this should be given a literal as well as a figurative reading. Thiselision lets Scherzinger show points where Deleuzo-Guattarian thought is, at thevery least, very closely related to Boulezian:

For Boulez, Polyphony can also be described as the diagonal distribution ofstructures: parts or voices no longer exist, strictly speaking: a morphological... organisation of a durational block .... As it is for Deleuze and Guattari, Boulezdescribes the blending of vertical (harmonic) with horizontal (melodic) dimen-sions of musical composition into a sound block/durational block, whose parts,for Deleuze and Guattari, no longer ha[ve] a point of origin, and, for Boulezlikewise, no longer exist. (p. 112)

This approach also allows one to see the surprising shadow of Adorno inDeleuzo-Guattarian thought, with Boulez the linchpin, as where Boulez statesthat in music there is no opposition between form and content, between abstracton the one hand and concrete on the other (p. 112).9 For all this, I thinkScherzinger goes too far: as he says, deterritorialization incorporates Boulezsdiagonal polyphonic thinking (p. 112; emphasis added). It is not reducible toit, however, not least because it incorporates (re-territorialises) a great deal elsetoo. Moreover, that likewise in the quotation above betokens significant differ-ences: no longer to have a point of origin is surely not the same as no longer toexist. Scherzinger is clearly aware of this: in his bold and speculative closing sallyhe suggests that, if only Deleuze and Guattari had attended to Boulez a littlemore carefully, they might have avoided the possibility of the rhizomes own

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re-territorialisation as the opaque network of trade in derivatives. Its difficult tobe wholly convinced by Scherzingers argument, but hard to avoid being struckby its force.

Scherzingers contribution is buttressed by two other chapters in which theethical dimension of Deleuzes output is central: Gallopes examination of thetension between the ethical and metaphysical in musical thought and Ciminisconsideration of the mind/body problem, as read through Deleuzes relationshipto Spinoza and what might be said about the relationship between music andethics as a result. Gallopes essay seems to me to exhibit a number of issues whichI find it difficult to resolve in context, including, for instance, the idea thatdifference in Deleuzian thought might be regarded not just as an a priori conditionbut as transcendental (p. 78). This isnt to say that Gallope is wrong in saying so,but because the transcendentalism of Deleuzes thought is of a very specific kind,this sort of statement surely requires far greater unpicking, as does the collapseGallope effects between aesthetics and ethics, in opposition to metaphysics. Forall this, his identification of two distinct philosophies of music which play outthrough the course of A Thousand Plateaus and which are, perhaps, unreconciledand irreconcilable producing, he suggests, a certain residue, which might remindthe reader of the leftovers of Higginss contribution (p. 101) forces a usefullyhard-headed re-examination of that aspect of Deleuze and Guattaris text.

Ciminis essay is more immediate, developing Deleuzes statement that amusical form will depend on a complex relation between speeds and slownessesof sound particles. It is not just a matter of music but of how to live; it is by speedand slowness that one slips among things, that one connects with somethingelse.10 Cimini links this to Spinozas statement that [b]odies are distinguishedfrom one another by reason of motion and rest, speed and slowness and not byreason of substance (p. 136; emphasis in original). From this perspective, andresting upon the proximity of Deleuzes sound particles to Xenakiss sonicgrains, Cimini embarks on a fascinating examination of the interaction ofcomposite sonorous bodies (of music and of listeners) in the experience ofXenakiss music, although it feels to me that the chapter never quite deliversupon its (admittedly ambitious) goals of discussing how to live in musical terms.

The questions of motion implicit in speeds and slownesses form the pointof departure for Bidima too, yet this chapter feels broadly synoptic, despite hisstated aim, in following Deleuze, not to plant his feet on the footsteps alreadyimprinted but rather behind or beside those traces (p. 146). There is much tobe learned here regarding Bidimas particular approach to Deleuzian intensity,but the few pages on which music features seem, on the one hand, to circle roundwithout ever reaching the point while, on the other, making concrete statementswhich could have been reached, I think, without the intervention of Deleuze:[s]ince music works with intensities, transformations, and durations, it wouldseem to be more fluid than painting (p. 156).

Perhaps curiously, this vagueness nevertheless acts as a highly effective struc-tural bridge to the volumes final five essays, all of which examine specific music

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in specific terms: Nesbitt on jazz; Judy Lochhead on Wolfgang Rihms AmHorizont; Marianne Kielian-Gilbert on Bach, Mary Chapin Carpenter,Stravinsky and the tango arrangement of Roxanne in Baz Luhrmanns MoulinRouge; Bruce Quaglia on Luciano Berios Charles Eliot Norton Lectures atHarvard between 1993 and 1994; and Ildar Khannanov on the music of theBashkirian nomads and Chopin.

This closing section begins explosively with Nesbitts remarkable essay onjazz. The core message, which recurs at several points within the volume, is thatnew insights might be marshalled through the insistence on multipliciousassemblage in place of protean subject, here an instrument-club-musician-head-solo-influences-practice-time-mood assemblage (p. 159). Nesbitt is certainlynot frivolous in deploying this multifaceted idea and largely delivers on itsimplicit promise, especially in an examination of John Coltrane which leadsto the conclusion that [i]n music, the proper noun Coltrane designatesnot a biological individual, but a sounding machine of immeasurable intensities,an encounter between Coltrane and Elvin Jones that energizes a set ofnonsubjectified affects to the highest pitch (p. 179). No less significantly,Nesbitts essay is one of only a few in the volume which are successful innegotiating the distinctions which might be made between a Deleuzian anda Deleuzo-Guattarian approach. Thus, the concept of bodies in play here isclearly Deleuzian-Spinozist, while the assemblage is no less evidently Deleuzo-Guattarian. Moreover, Nesbitt is able to keep some contextual distance fromDeleuze by employing Alain Badiou (Deleuzes most intimate enemy, at leastfrom Badious perspective [p. 162]). This broader context, too, allows Nesbitt tomake some sense of a Deleuzian transcendent in a way which seemed rather lesssophisticated in the context of Gallopes contribution.

Lochheads analysis ofAmHorizont is no less rich and engaging, and successfulto my mind in its aim of engender[ing] new musical encounters with the piece(p. 197). Yet it does not seem to be in any fundamental way a Deleuzian approachto analysis or even to be an analysis which Deleuzian modes of thought mighthelpfully prompt. In short, the analysis might have been undertaken whollyindependently of Deleuzian thought (and would not, I should stress, be any worsefor it). The underlying issue might be found in Lochheads suggestion that

[a] music criticism premised on ideas from Deleuzes solo and his duet writingwith Guattari would start ... not with the question What does it mean? but ratherHow does it function? ... Some of the descriptive methods of music analysisprovide an initial starting point for such a music criticism, but only a startingpoint since music analysis often takes as its goal an exposition of the technicaldetails of musical structure such structure often understood as compositionaltechnique. (p. 185)

This does not sound very much like the sort of musical analysis which I wouldrecognise as normative in the contemporary musicological world. I find similarissues in Quaglias essay on relationships between Deleuze and Berio, especiallyin his report of Berios

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caution and outright skepticism about the ways in which analysis may becomeexcessively creative, but especially when the analyst attempts to interiorize aclosed system that is subsequently intended to be demonstrated or even proven bytheir analysis. Berios criticism of such systems of analysis seems to concern theirreductive nature, and he becomes especially scathing when he cites Schenkeriansor neo-positivists as examples of this practice. (p. 234)

On my reading of this, Quaglia seems largely in agreement with Berios criticism.Yet it seems to me that, thankfully, this is something of a straw man (even if itmay have appeared less so to Berio, speaking in the early 1990s). Analysis thepoint of which is ultimately to reify the analytical approach would simply be badanalysis, and not the end goal even (perhaps especially) of those seeking gener-alised and generalisable approaches. Certainly I see little in this description thatI would recognise amongst contemporary Schenkerians. More problematic, in anycase, is the way in which Quaglia seeks to link Deleuze to Berio, which feels atouch forced: by turns insisting on some actual link between the two in, forinstance, the existence of (admittedly admiring) correspondence from the phi-losopher to the composer, while elsewhere stressing distance to the extent thata firm understanding of post-war European philosophical and cultural develop-ments is critical to understanding Berios music and poetics, where Deleuzeis but a critical component of that history (p. 229). This tension is not reallyresolved or even to any serious extent engaged with in Quaglias contribution.In this historicised context, it seems hard to think that Adorno is not rather moreto the point in Berios conceptions of analysis and the utopian musical work;here, unlike in Scherzingers essay, it is not the case that the reader might be ledto suspect any surprising proximity of Adornian and Deleuzian thought. Thecriticism of analytical approaches mentioned above seems to be drawn directlyfrom the Adornian playbook for examining the fetishisation of the row, whileQuaglias argument that even though music cannot stop or start ... wars or feedthe hungry, it can create the virtual subjectivity of the yet to come, to conditionthe willing listener and so create the opening for a revolution yet to come seemsstrongly reminiscent of Adornos broadly utopian argument within AestheticTheory.11 This is far from saying that Quaglia is not an acute, insightful com-mentator on Berio he is, and there is much to ponder in his examination of theNorton lectures but seeing what is presented here as particularly Deleuzian isdifficult. Nevertheless, I am convinced that Quaglias instincts are quite right,and that the Chemins in particular might be a fruitful site for such an imbricationof theory and practice.

Kielian-Gilberts contribution is far more theoretically sophisticated, thoughthis sophistication is often achieved very simply and directly: early in the essaythere is a striking Deleuzo-Guattarian approach to the dance when Kielian-Gilbert asserts that music becomes a working out and/or a way of articulatingand actualizing a philosophy, memory, quality of sound, of what it means to door think or feel in music (e.g., to waltz, waltzing, becoming waltz) (p. 203).Here, however, the way in which becoming plays out in engagement with specific

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musics is less satisfying. In the case of Carpenters He Thinks Hell Keep Her,the narrative depicts a woman who has spent her life working tirelessly for herhusband (the latter seems, in the context of the song, to think hell keep herwithout expending any effort at all) but who leaves him to work in the typingpool at minimum wage. The moment of this shift in the ordered world ofthe track comes as the expected fourth verse is excised from songs structure:Verse 1, Bridge 1/Verse 2, Bridge 2, Chorus/Verse 3, Bridge 3, Chorus/Bridge 4,Chorus. Kielian-Gilbert proposes that this removal of what ought to bethe place of the fourth verse musically materializes and performs-becomesmetamorphically this change in life and time through the repetition and pairing ofBridge 3Chorus and Bridge 4Chorus (p. 215; emphasis in original). I thinkKielian-Gilberts analysis is more than plausible, but she goes on to juxtapose theidea that

Carpenters singing by a woman with a group of women and directed to womenof her time performs (intensionally embodies) vocal reiteration (and in the force oftheir repeated strumming on acoustic guitars) the acquisition of strength andself-respect, dimensions not mentioned or spoken of in the text. (p. 216; emphasisin original)

with Deleuze and Guattaris assertion that a becoming is not a correspondencebetween relations. But neither is it a resemblance, an imitation, or at the limit,an identification (p. 216). I find it difficult to see that what has been describedby Kielian-Gilbert is necessarily different from the nuance and subtexts avail-able within common-or-garden mimesis. In any case, the analytical portionsof the essay do not contain anything quite so striking as that remarkableimage of waltz-becoming-dancer/dancer-becoming-waltz, which seems to memost elegantly to cause an immediate rethinking of a particular bodily relation-ship with sound.

Similarly, I find myself unconvinced by Khannanovs essay, at least to thedegree which there seems to be, again, something of an over-reliance, thoughhere less pronounced than in Kielian-Gilberts contribution, on relatively sim-plistic mimetic correlations between immanent musical features and meaning,as, for instance, when [m]elodic accents [in the Bashkirian song Hairullakai]are very much like the stone monuments in the steppes; that is, places to feed thehorses, the steps, arrests in motion (p. 253). There is also some sort of sense ofoneness (or, more specifically, unity) deployed between the Bashkir and theirterritory, in a way which, if anything, feels opposed to what Deleuze and Guattarihave to say about territories and their occupation, where the deterritorializationof flows in general effectively merges with mental alienation, inasmuch as itincludes the reterritorializations that permit it to subsist only as the state ofa particular flow, a flow of madness that is defined thus because it is chargedwith representing whatever escapes the axiomatics and the applications ofreterritorialization in other flows.12 Moreover, once again it seems to me that

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formal analytical strategies are dispatched in a way which would wholly makesense only if were they as dogmatic as the description of them here implies. Andyet, somehow these inconsistencies seem to matter little. In one sense, at least,this closing essay is thoroughly Deleuzo-Guattarian: it takes from what is nearestat hand just as much as from that which is furthest away. Etymology, geography,history, philosophy (of a largely Husserlian kind) and analysis collide, and it isthis willingness to allow conflicting ideas to sit next to one another sometimesreconciling, sometimes becoming something quite other through a failure toreach agreement which seems the most positive and laudable feature of theessay. Nor are the binary oppositions deployed left to fight it out, provocativethough they are, as in the moment where Khannanov reverses the staff-basedevaluation of musical distance (the small minor second through to thelarge major seventh) to show the acoustic ratios (real sizes of intervals, asKhannanov, a touch unfortunately, has it; these are surely no more real and noless virtual than others, unless one adopts a particular empirical perspectivewhich, again, seems distant from Deleuzes particular brand of empiricism)running from a perfect octave at the smallest through to the largest, a minorsecond. This reversal a sort of escape, Khannanov hints, sharing a kinship (ofsorts) with the escape from a predator, during which an animal uses hearing asa backward-looking radar, while its vision is used to navigate the path of escape(p. 262) segues into a sequences of rapid-fire observations on Chopin in which,for example, the moments following bar 185 of the Ballade No. 2 in F majorescape the logic of the Schenkerian line as

a simple cadential progression of ii V56 7 lurches into a Fr+6. This would have been

more or less normal if the next chord was the dominant. Oscillations, quicklytouching the predominant chord between two strong dominants seem to be OK,at least from a Schenkerian point of view. However, the Fr+6 remains in the air.(p. 263)

In this space between this first dominant and the next in bar 192 long enoughthat Khannanov is surely right that reducing this to a surface feature would makelittle sense he opines that

[t]he French augmented sixth chord has its place in the syntax of the normaltemporal flow. It must precede the dominant. In our case it does the opposite: itfollows the dominant. While this does not change much on paper and on aSchenkerian graph, in real musical space it wreaks havoc. All the forces of chaosare unleashed. The power of reverse functionality is such that the flow of time(and space) changes its direction. In fact, the musical time in m. 185 of ChopinsBallade No. 2 flows backward. (p. 264; emphasis in original)

Perhaps I might not go quite so far. But I would concede that, at the very least,Khannanov has a point. In truth, one can imagine the analytical insights intoChopin having been reached more easily than via the route taken here, if onesinterest were only in Chopin. To some extent, Khannanovs conclusion is little

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more than that syntactical approaches to analysis may well mislead, paperingover the cracks which constitute a more normative experience of the music inhand. Yet a real which feels much more Deleuzian even if still a virtual real occurs where Khannanov argues that [m]usic does not exist in preexistingtime. Rather, it constitutes time (p. 264). The Chopin example is useful, yes,but really because of what it has to say about ways of thinking, and ways ofthinking as a Deleuzian. This is at least one way in which the Deleuzian virtualbecomes, I think, most potent, and regardless (or because) of the many incon-sistencies otherwise with Deleuze, Khannanov remains simultaneously uncon-vincing and wholly compelling (and it seems clear from his final paragraph thatthe author is perfectly well aware that this is the reaction the text might inspire).

The volume surely does not resolve those questions it poses for itself at theoutset. Indeed, the work as a whole does not even seem exactly clear whetherit is Deleuze who is the subject-method-thought in play here or Deleuze andGuattari, with Guattari, as so often, treated as if his thought can be simply andconveniently subsumed under the proper name Deleuze. Only at points, evenwithin this frame, does one really have the sense of an assemblage which mightbe written Deleuze-music (or music-Deleuze) or, for that matter, musicology-Deleuze (Deleuze-musicology), although Nesbitts contribution makes a com-pelling case that it can be done and, when done as successfully as in Nesbittshands, is well worth the candle. The volume ought by rights, then, to beunsatisfying, somehow a failure; but it is not. Indeed, many of the points atwhich it is most successful are in precisely those essays where something seemsto be unresolved or where the musical and philosophical parts of a particularargument seem to be left in tension. For all the critique above, the only essayswhich were not, for this reader, a joy to encounter were those where a rela-tively simple reading of Deleuze was used as a basic analytical strategy, wherethe encounter between Deleuze and music was not allowed to be a problem-atic one. The most successful essays for my money, those from Higgins,Nesbitt and Khannanov give much space for the reader productively to argueand debate. The authors and editors have, I think, been remarkably successfulin producing essays which invite criticism of the best sort, which do not pindown meaning, but force it to be produced as the reader intersects with (whichis to say, becomes) the text. What could be more Deleuzian (or ought that tobe Deleuzo-Guattarian?) than that?

MARTIN IDDON

NOTES

1. These include Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda (eds), Deleuze and Music(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), and Ronald Bogue,Deleuze onMusic, Painting, and the Arts (London: Routledge, 2003), though

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there has also been some musicological response, most recently in theform of Edward Campbells Music after Deleuze (London: Bloomsbury,2013).

2. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, tr. Hugh Tomlinson(London: Athlone, 1986 [first French edn 1983]) and Deleuze, Cinema 2:The Time-Image, tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London:Athlone, 1989 [first French edn 1985]).

3. See Gilles Deleuze, quoted in Brian Massumi, Translators Foreword:Pleasures of Philosophy, in A Thousand Plateaus (London: Athlone, 1987),p. ix.

4. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition (London: Athlone, 1994 [firstFrench edn 1968]); and Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A ThousandPlateaus, tr. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone, 1988 [first French edn1980]).

5. At the same time, Hastys claim that Deleuze expresses great generosity tothe past (Plato, Hume, Kant ...) (p. 21) is debatable. I would agree thatDeleuzes volume on Kant is affectionate in its way, but Kant surelyremains the enemy, while Deleuzes overturning of Platonism the way inwhich he suggests that the transcendent proceeds from the immanent andnot vice versa is not, to my mind, generous in the way in which Deleuzesrelationship with Hume might be described.

6. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 11.

7. Hulse says everything is hybrid almost as if hybridity were a universalgood, but where hybridity is a hybridity of a pair what it feels like tobecome hybridised might very well be different according to which memberof the pair one is. So, in one sense at least, both wasp and orchidhybridise, but the experience is hardly the same for each (and hardly soutopian a result as Hulse seems to imply).

8. Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Intellectuals and Power, in MichelFoucault: Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, ed. Donald F. Brouchard,tr. Donald F. Brouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1977 [first French edn 1972]), p. 165.

9. Elsewhere, Lois Fitch has elided the two thinkers, with Brian Ferneyhoughthe alembic on that occasion. See Brian Ferneyhough, PostmodernModernist , in Bjrn Heile (ed.), The Modernist Legacy: Essays on NewMusic (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 15975.

10. See Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, tr. Robert Hurley (SanFrancisco, CA: City Lights, 1988 [first French edn 1970]), p. 123.

11. See, in particular, Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, tr. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone, 1999 [first German edn 1970]), pp. 1645.

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12. See Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, tr. Robert Hurley,Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (London: Athlone, 1984 [first French edn1972]), p. 352; emphasis in original.

NOTE ON CONTRIBUTOR

MARTIN IDDON is a musicologist and composer who studies postwar music inGermany and the United States, and the author of New Music at Darmstadt:Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, and Boulez, and John Cage and David Tudor: Corre-spondence on Interpretation and Performance (both Cambridge University Press).He has also published on musical modernism, experimental music, and musicalaesthetics, among other topics.

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music analysis volume 33 issue 3 2014

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