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"Becoming-Still: Perspectives in Musical
Ontology after Deleuze and Guattari"
Michael
Szekely
A child in the dark,
gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath. He walks and halts to his song. Lost, he takes shelter, or orients himself with
his little song as best he can. The song is
like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of
chaos. Perhaps the child skips as he sings,
hastens or slows his pace. But the song
itself is already a skip: it jumps from chaos to the beginnings of order in chaos and is
in danger of breaking apart at any moment (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, 311).
We differentiate, for the purposes of
theoretical explication, but with an ear attuned to any praxeological ramifications,
between the musical space and making-music.
Musical space is better initially apprehended as a paradigm rather than as a
totality. With all the technical implements,
imaginative intuitions, and methodological strategies, the performer is situated within a
musical space. There is not yet any ambition
here – only an as yet open territory of possibility.
But in a musical space this territory is agitated. The performer simply finds herself there: will she be trapped or will she be still? To an extent, this very question involves a
tension within making-music. For making-music
will either psychologize itself into a motivation toward aesthetic value structures or
become dissolved, albeit with discontinuous agitations, into a smooth surface. Will the performer be ambitious or will she become…?
Starting from the forms one has, the subject one is, the organs one has, or the functions one fulfills, becoming is to extract particles between which one establishes the relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness that are closest to that which one is becoming, and through which one becomes .
Becoming-music is defined by the
trajectory from making-music to the musical space, but this trajectory operates as a break. Making-music
gives itself ecstatically over to the musical space.
There is indeed a momentary sense of emptiness here, or, better yet, of
numbness, but it is perhaps better described as a fullness-to-explosion. Fullness-to-explosion is precisely the
confrontation between the totality of historied having-to-do-with-music strata and the
paradigm of a musical space.
One opens the
circle not on the side where the old forces of chaos press against it but in another
region, one created by the circle itself .
There is some
truth to an adage amongst some musicians that one learns everything about music, about
music-making, in order to “unlearn” it. If
the above trajectory from making-music to the music space were “full,” it would
mark the performer attempting to remember all that she has learned, to utilize efficient
memory instead of desirous forgetting – short-term
memory, forgetting as a process – precisely in order to “create” a
musical space. With the same result, if the
above trajectory from making-music to the musical space were “empty,” it would
mark the performer feeling as though she has not learned enough. “Becoming is an antimemory” .
But is there a reverse trajectory – that is, from a musical space to making-music?
In one sense, it would simply be the depletion of what we have described thus far:
the musical space is in some way questioned as to its fullness, or emptiness,
reterritorialized in order to “make this
music.” Thus, the totality of historied
having-to-do-with-music strata resurfaces in some form, and the performer objectifies the
musical space in order to “make” music; the musical space exists merely as an
opportunity for making-music. Now,
superficially, this is true – that is, “musical space” does have the
connotation of something created beforehand, e.g., via categorization, instrumentation,
and configuration (duo, trio, quartet, quintet, orchestra), venue, and audience, expected
or presently gathered. It would be said that
all of these “contribute” to the actual performance; and that the performer
especially is well-aware of them. However,
these might better be described as a way of making-music “outside” of the
making-music in the performance. They
constitute the discourses and social conditions of music as an historical entity. Indeed, we make most of our music outside of
picking up any instruments. Music is
prostituted in this way; one need not play music in order to play at making music. Thus, in the case of music the discourses and
social conditions coincide with how we imagine it to participate culturally, and how we
imagine our cultures to participate in it. But
here too there is a break: expectations of music will never be completely fulfilled. It is a matter of gradations, of the intensity of
such expectations. So, within a somewhat
superficial field our playing-at-making-music is indeed a kind of “musical space,”
a savoir of music. Of course, there are other intensities present in
a performance.
There are
intensities of expectation constituted by the savoir of music, but the suggestion that
they will never be completely fulfilled entails precisely that they will be uprooted, then
left, or changed – which is to say, deterritorialized: intensities of expectation
becoming performance intensities. Once again,
there is no “outlook” for these intensities, and certainly no judgment. There is no outlook, i.e., of intensities of
expectation affecting the performance “negatively” or “positively.” For it is by way of an event that they affect the musical space at all. There is no judgment, i.e., of the performance
being “bad” or “good” from having been affected by intensities of
expectation. For if we wonder at this we are
simply playing at music, resisting the musical space.
Fair enough. But what of a
recording? This would seem to present a
slightly different problematic.
Certainly it
could be argued that, although one performance
of Edgar Varese’s “Ameriques” will nonetheless be different from the next,
that one performance of “Ameriques” which is “captured” by a recording is available to us again and again as
the “same” performance, not just the same notes, but the same attacks, the same
inflections, the same rhythmic and temporal milieu.
The problem with this example, as an objection to what we have said about
performance, is that in order to make it an objection one must paradoxically deny somewhat
the musical space of this performance of
“Ameriques,” looking instead to the savoir inevitably built-up around this
recording’s performance, and the piece itself. We
tend to rely too much upon what “grows” on us as “moments” of the
performance we do or do not enjoy. We rely
upon things about which we are value-neutral, but which we can nonetheless anticipate
again and again, whenever we slip this recording, this “immortalization” of
“Ameriques” into our player. Still,
we somehow cheat the musical space “Ameriques” creates – thus cheating our
own experience of it each time – by letting
its immortalization collapse solely into the
savoir built so readily around it. Actually,
we make “Ameriques” an arborescent structure, a totality, a hierarchy of
moments, by rooting it in a recording. We
stop listening to it. Our expectational
intensities have been, if not completely fulfilled, directed toward “what I will hear,” generally, and “what
will happen here,” specifically, in the
music. In a recording, even more so than in a
performance, the intensities of a performance requires more deterritorializing impetus. In a performance, our expectational intensities
are more and more transformed by intensities of performance simply by the musical space in
which we find ourselves, insofar as there is fullness-to-explosion. In a recording, however, intensities, even
expectational ones, are increasingly rooted, as we have suggested, as we come to “learn”
the recording. In a performance, we are inevitably deterritorialized, at least
initially, at whatever gradation our intensities of expectation at the onset. In a recording, however, we are inevitably handed
a reterritorializing card. Recording is a
recoding. With a recording there is a
tendency to not only recodify the music, but to recodify ourselves in the process. If we can acknowledge that each time we listen to
this particular recorded performance of Varese’s “Ameriques” the music,
through whatever intensities and discoveries enthusing us, is not the same, not phenomenologically-in-itself, not the sum of its sounds (in essence,
potentially decoding), then the same must be true for ourselves. We bring the difference and singularity of our
lives to the operating table each and every time we experience even that same (i.e.,
recorded) performance of “Ameriques.” This
speaks of us more generally that we experience any
music at every turn improvisationally. This
speaks of music that it is essentially deterritorializing.
Now, we will
still look to the savoir surrounding Varese’s piece and find that the methods,
techniques, and approaches involved are not at all “improvisational,” as they
are in improvisational jazz, for example. However,
what are these methods, techniques, and approaches but precisely that which constitute the
savoir built-up around Varese’s “Ameriques”?
Indeed, it should strike us as odd that such aspects of certain types of
music have stood as the inventory for various Western cultural elites as to why
improvisational jazz, which is said to lack these aspects, is not as “serious” a
music. First of all, if it is to be at all acknowledged that improvisational jazz does implement methods, techniques, and approaches,
only perhaps not necessarily the same ones as Western classical music, then the challenge
is based on an arbitrary distinction regarding which aspects constitute seriousness. More profound, however, is the fact that, even
here, we can only make the claim against “Ameriques”-as-improvisation from
outside the musical space created by the music, outside of the endlessly different musical
spaces created every time we experience the music. Still,
one might insist, “Ameriques” is a composed
piece; the players read from a score; there is
no interpretation involved. Let us move backwards through this objection.
Firstly, no
interpretation? Would we actually have the
audacity to assert that there is an “original” version of the Varese piece? What is this original? The score? Whose
scoring of it? Varese’s own? The Boosey and Hawkes’ printing of it? A particular recording perhaps? Whose performance of it? The Ensemble Modern conducted by Ingo Metzmacher? The Ensemble Intercontemporain conducted by Pierre
Boulez? You get the idea.
Secondly, what
after all is a score? If we insist on asking the question this way, we
run into some interesting but ultimately futile discussion, trying to negotiate the
balance between the real and the virtual, the sound and the image, the action and the
symbol. Here we are deducing the having-to-do-with-music. But a musical space strikes us, upon ecstatic induction, as already
virtual reality, as sound-image, as symbolic action.
So, instead, we might ask the question, “How after all goes
a score?” We can discover this only by
playing it: “I’ll play it first and tell you what it is later” (Miles
Davis). A score is not a way to “create”
a musical space. Playing a score is a musical space.
Simply apprehending a score implies precisely the arborescence of rooting
music in that score, whereas a musical space implies the nomadism of playing. Alas, we do more than “interpret” a
score; we experiment with it, from it. When we come to the “composed” elements,
then, we see yet again a break – a break in methods, techniques, and approaches:
1) from
composer to composition – an urge-writing
improvisation.
2) from
score to performer – a symbolic-interpretive
improvisation.
3) from
performer to the air, to the world – a sound-release
improvisation.
Now, the question of how and when these
operations occur is a question for every
musical space, occurring with different multiplicities of
intensities, with different interest, within different capacities and contexts. Choosing to compose one note against another,
indeed to compose one note instead of no note, is to make an improvisational choice. Choosing to play just so soft when you see “ppp” written in a score is to make an
improvisational choice. But here still we
must speak of the gradations of experiencing a musical space, of gradations as regards ways of improvising a musical space.
As it turns out,
that which we say of the performer is to be said of the listener is to be said of the
composer, etc. We say “spectrum-modes”
to emphasize the praxeological anarchy of these various lines of flight to and from music,
a resistance to their hierarchizing tendencies, even as is possible merely in the
theoretical explication of them. For we are
tempted by the savoir of music in which we are situated to apprehend these as more and
more specialized, a broader to thinner, as larger to smaller, when in fact they all
negotiate their own spectrum, which may or may not involve these types of trajectories. Experiencing-improvising music is playing, is
listening in it, is composing it, is thinking it, is reading it.
One
launches forth, hazards an improvisation. But
to improvise is to join with the World, or meld with it.
One ventures from home on the thread of a tune .
We are at any
point engaged in any or all of the above spectrum-modes.
But it would be significant, of course, if we were to say essentially the
opposite – that is, that we are but one of these spectrum-modes, or none of them at
all.
The former marks
the schizophrenic musician. Albeit with intensities that always have the
potential to be oriented toward a certain spectrum-mode at the expense of any others, she
nonetheless extended outward from the musical space in which she has been
(de)territorialized. She extends her ear
outward to listen in the musical space, an ear swallowed by the musical space. She extends her lips and her limbs, her bowels and
her groin, outward to play in the musical space, a playing situated in the musical space,
as it is given force by it. She extends her
hand-brain outward to compose on a blank page, a page that acts like a fetish. She extends her sound-thoughts outward to think in
the musical space.
However, the
initial, “given,” (de)territorialization is not at all enough for the
schizophrenic musician. Although it was in
resisting the reterritorializing strains possible in any musical space that she extended
outward to become any number of spectrum-modes (e.g., as performer-becoming-listener, as
listener-becoming-thinker, as thinker-becoming-composer, as composer-becoming-performer),
the schizophrenic musician ultimately stretches to extend so far outward as to touch the
impossible. Her desire for a completely
smooth, flattened, musical space from which she
would be all but indistinguishable is so positive that she will risk herself again and
again, becoming-music to the point of stillness. Somehow,
like the musical space in which she finds herself simply by playing, this stillness toward
which she ultimately extends herself seems inexorably attached to her desire, presenced
simply by her desiring. She desires to extend
so far that she would even defy extension: “…spatium not extension, Zero
intensity as principle of production”.
The paranoid musician is concerned with isolating, or
obliterating, spectrum-modes. Albeit with
expectational intensities that could just as easily become performance intensities, she
nonetheless retracts her ear inward to listen for the music-making, an ear straining to
listen for “things” in the music. She
retracts her lips and her limbs, her bowels and her groin, inward to play at music-making,
a playing-at situated outside the musical space, as it attempts with such defeated
precision to force a musical space, to create it. She
retracts her hand-brain inward to control the musical space by composing on a blank page,
a page she imagines already written, already played, already heard – a page which is
truly blank. She retracts her sound-thoughts
inward to think about music, to play at the having-to-do-with-music, to trace her
knowledge of its strata: “The map has to do with performance, whereas tracing always
involves an alleged ‘competence’”. The
paranoid musician is the one who consistently looks to the savoir of music, who
consistently describes music in terms of methods, techniques, and approaches, who
consistently asks, “Did you hear this in
the music?” or “How will I play this type
of music?” Of course, some discourse is
unavoidable. Even a multiplicity of
performance intensities could be said to activate discourses, and somehow, as we have
suggested, the savoir of music can slip into even the smoothest, flattest, musical space
imaginable.
Still, the
schizophrenic musician – like the avant-garde artist, the surrealist, who forced the
confrontation between art-as-institution and art-as-life praxis – has some desire,
enough so that she may let go, parody, transform, deterritorialize the savoir, sabotage
the discourse. It is the opposite with the
paranoid musician. She uses discourse to
sabotage the musical space, uses the savoir to reterritorialize performance intensities
into expectational ones, attempts to form a musical space by making-music, attempts to
redirect subversions, attempts to grab onto a territory.
But “there is a territory precisely when milieu components cease to be directional, becoming dimensional instead,
when they cease to be functional to become expressive.
There is a territory when the rhythm has expressiveness” (315, my
emphasis).
The generative
activity of a musical space is precisely such that there is a sense of singularities
(i.e., events occurring at an extremely localized level) that just were and singularities that are not just yet.
Our schizophrenic musician “gets on the train” of these
singularities, blowing them up into sustained intensities.
…as
the work develops, the motifs increasingly enter into conjunction, conquer their own
plane, become autonomous from the dramatic action, impulses, and situations…(319).
A tone, for
example, is not only generative in that it always stands in relation to other tones, or
groupings of tones, which move through the musical space, but because its duration,
attack, and inflection propel that tones and other tones forward. A tone is not a note, or, a tone is not merely a note, or, a tone is a more subtle, profound, acute quality of a note (either
of these could suffice). We are tempted to
describe tones the same way in which we describe notes.
Indeed, “duration,” “attack,” and “inflection,”
are all terms which have meaning as regards directives for making-music – i.e., how
to play at that note, how to listen to that note, how to compose that note, etc. But notes remain functional. Even beyond their ultimately arbitrary
designations (“C#,” “F,” “Gb,” “B”), they can
exist only in the having-to-do-with-music, only in the discourses of music, only as
regards the savoir of music. Notes thrown
into a multiplicity of performance intensities – whether played or read from a score
– inevitably lose their functionality and become dissolved into the musical space,
disseminated into the performative territory, arousing perhaps newer “functions”
which, far from being grounding attributes, are immanently deterritorializing. They become affective. They
become tones. Moreover, this becoming does
not express a one-to-one relation: a note does
not become a tone, but is already a multiplicity
of tones. [Even if we choose to play at music
in terms of notes, we find that a note is of
course experienced differently depending on where, how, why, on what, from what, through
what, it is played]. If notes are to
constitute the “material” of making-music, tones constitute the sensations felt within a musical space.
Every
sensation is a question, even if the only answer is silence
(What is Philosophy?, 196).
So, not only
notes, but all methods, techniques, and approaches brought to a musical space become
sensation in some way, become multiplicities of sensations.
Now, for the sake of our theoretical explication, could we say that these
sensations are essentially singularities, or, more commonly, that they constitute “moments”? Well, first of all, we know that an analogous
relationship between notes and intensities would be incorrect, though tempting. In some sense notes and intensities are not only categorically contrasting – the former
savoiric, the latter performative – but functionally
contrasting. The former are “broken down”
into tones, whereas the latter are “built up” from singularities. But we might also say that sensations are both
more pervasive and more acute than singularities. Singularities
mark a more present-at-hand, active becoming, while sensations mark a passive becoming,
underlying our experience. Active becoming of
singularities: the circulation of desiring-music. Passive
becoming of sensations: the blood of desiring-music.
Meanwhile, it
must be remembered that although a train is “confined” to a track, a pattern, a
direction, it nonetheless moves ahead. The
trajectory of the train moves through the
instantaneously changing content of the world. Although
there is an effort to expand a singular occurrence, to convert it, the rhythmic-horizontal plane upon which that
occurrence is resituated nonetheless moves through an invariably changing chaotic-vertical plane (we may call these the two
planar tendencies within the plane of a musical space).
The musical space becomes surreal: the result being exemplary of a meeting
between chance and necessity (le hazard objectif).
What
chaos and rhythm have in common is the in-between – between two milieus,
rhythm-cosmos or the chaosmos…In this in-between, chaos becomes rhythm, not
inexorably, but it has a chance to (ATP, 313).
Ultimately,
there is involved at any point in a musical space a kind of phenomenological “horizon”
of sorts, with an Husserlian emphasis on retention
on one end and a Heideggerian emphasis on protention
on the other end. Schizophrenic music is in a
sense the ecstatic becoming in-between these ends. The
flattened stillness of the musical space mentioned above is approached the more and more
agitated this ecstasy becomes. Now, it should
strike us as a somewhat paranoid, reterritorializing tendency to fabricate a build-up of
intensities from a singular occurrence. Indeed,
it would seem to be exemplary of making-music, of looking to the having-to-do-with-music,
of trying to create a musical space, or at least create a “moment” in a musical
space. For in order to engage this one must
step away from the musical space and toward making-music.
Alas, our suspicions are not unfounded: reterritorialization will inevitably happen in performance. Points of convergence will be contrived at times. However, from what has been said about the meeting
of rhythmic-horizontals and chaotic-verticals, we find that there is the stubborn
deterritorializing tendency of a musical space which forces any attempt at making-music
into a multiplicity of performance intensities. We
may say that it forces a line.
A
line of becoming is not defined by the points that it connects, or by the points that
compose it; on the contrary, it passes between points, it comes up through the middle, it
runs perpendicular to the points first perceived, transversally to the localizable
relation to distant or contiguous points.
In a musical
space there is no intention, only retention, protention, ecstasy. A truly depleted paranoid making-music, whether in
performance or not, would involve merely retention. Even
repetition, firmly placed in the savoir of various types of music, whether more or less
manifest (more in the minimalism and “phase” music of Terry Riley and Steve
Reich, for example; less in most improvisational jazz), and seemingly based on retention, is nonetheless made
sheer difference by its protention. In
repetition, a protention-diagonal cuts through and across the rhythmic-horizontal and
chaotic-vertical. Indeed, a rubbing between
repetition and time, between repetition and becoming, marks the sheer difference in
repetition. For instance, the balalaika
player who effortlessly repeats that one note in the context of a flowing, almost
rubatoesque, melodicism, approaches something ecstatic.
Indeed, she approaches the smooth surface of a musical space, perhaps even
more differentiated in this case for the fact that, unlike an instrument with a natural
sustaining mechanism, or even a stringed instrument with a bow, a note on the balalaika is
sustained only by repeated attacks. So, one is “aware” of the repetitions,
the repeated attacks, while becoming increasingly “unaware” of them over time. Repetition is a paradoxical breeding ground of
sorts. On the one hand, when engaged in a
musical space it is present so unabashedly that it easily risks reterritorialization; it
can be sustained, or “taken up” again and again, for effect, for usefulness. On the other hand, when engaged in a musical
space, it forever deterritorializes, cutting abruptly through the meat of the chaos while
simultaneously retaining the chaotic flows – a sudden shift barely felt.
Repetition
is truly that which disguises itself in constituting itself, that which constitutes itself
only by disguising itself. It is not
underneath the masks, but is formed from one mask to another, as though from one
distinctive point to another, from one privileged instant to another, with and within the
variations (Deleuze, Difference and
Repetition, 17).
A “repeated”
rhythm is not a repeated sameness, but is always rhythm differentiated, always potentially
“poly-rhythmic,” precisely because repetition thrusts it against time, even against its own weave of forces,
accents, and intensities. In contrast to
cadence and metricality, repetition and rhythm mark the kind of “unbalanced”
quality of a musical space. They express the
production of difference in a musical space, which may, paradoxically, be expressed in
terms of cadence and metricality, which may, in turn, differentiate the pulse of the
musical space even further, and so on: “…a period exists only in so far as it is
determined by a tonic accent, commanded by intensities.
Yet we would be mistaken about the function of accents if we said that they
were reproduced at equal intervals. On the
contrary, tonic and intensive values act by creating inequalities or incommensurabilities
between metrically equivalent period or spaces…Here again, the unequal is the most
positive element. Cadence is only the
envelope of a rhythm, and of a relation between rhythms”.
We tend to think
of repetition in terms of continuity, and there may be some truth to this assumption. Alas, we experience it as a very distinct quality
occurring in the musical over time, and in a
certain way. But this assessment of
repetition is isolatable only for a paranoid reception of a musical space, only for a
one-dimensional (if at all dimensional!) critique, only for someone who insists upon
asking, “How exactly is repetition functioning here?” Assessing repetition in this way represents it – but this endeavor denies the
fact of repetition’s presencing: “…within representation, repetition is
indeed forced to undo itself even as it occurs. Or
rather, it does not occur at all. Repetition
in itself cannot occur under these conditions”.
Representation is a way of paranoia, added to difference but reducing it to
sameness. Repetition is a way of
schizophrenia, an anarchic, infinitely primary affectation that is expressed through
difference.
There
is…nothing repeated which may be isolated or abstracted from the repetition in which
it was formed, but in which it is also hidden. There
is no bare repetition…
Meanwhile, the
affectation of repetition is happening elsewhere and everywhere, its emergence has already
taken to its subversive, deterritorializing flight and spread like a virus. Repetition is infinitely more generative than
cumulative, more regeneration than reiteration, more an arouser of difference than a
sponge of sameness. What we hear is never the
same, at any instant, but infinitesimally different and infinitely repetitive. Repetition: build-up of intensities:
fullness-to-explosion: ecstasy: (stillness).
Deleuze, Gilles, Difference and
Repetition (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994).
Deleuze, Gilles, Negotiations (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1995).
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
(Minneapolis:
University of
Minnesota Press, 1987).
Columbia
University Press, 1994).