Music After Deleuze

by Edward Campbell

Music After Deleuze explores how Deleuzian concepts offer interesting ways of thinking about a wide range of musics. The concepts of difference, identity and repetition offer novel approaches to Western art music from Beethoven to Boulez and Bernhard Lang as well as jazz improvisation, popular and sacred music. The concepts of the 'rhizome', the 'assemblage' and the 'refrain' enable us to think of the specificity of musical works as the meeting of productive forces, for example in the contemporary opera of Dusapin and the experimental music theatre of Aperghis. The concepts of smooth and striated space form the starting point for musical and political reflections on pitch in Western and Eastern music. Deleuze's notion of time as multiple illumines the distinctive conceptions of musical time found in Debussy, Messiaen, Boulez, Carter and Grisey. Finally, the innovative semiotic theory forged in Deleuze-Guattarian philosophy offers valuable insights for a semiotics capable of engaging with the innovative, molecular music of Lachenmann, Aperghis and Levinas.

Genres: Music

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Alexander · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a perfectly adequate book on what it would mean to think of music ‘after Deleuze’. At issue here is not so much a ‘Deleuzian theory of music’, but more of a ‘what kind of considerations should we bring to bear upon music in light of Deleuzian philosophy?’. Or put differently, in what (new) ways can we think of say, musical temporality, rhythm, and pitch, were we to be inspired by Deleuzian motivations? It’s these kinds of questions which organise and orient Edward Campbell’s lucid little treatise, which, far more than Deleuze, in fact takes for its reference material a wealth of properly musical sources, among them composers like Pierre Boulez, Olivier Messiaen, Georges Aperghis and Gerard Grisey, along with musical styles like Gaelic psalm singing, South Asian gamelan music, and of course - and most predominantly - western ‘art music’.

Deleuze here thus serves as a kind of a backdrop, or even almost an excuse, to explore the themes and motifs that, at the level of music theory, unite - or in some cases divide - these many approaches to music. And while there’s a lot to learn from the diversity of musical examples chosen here, the fact that Campbell presents his analyses as so many ‘exemplars' of this or that 'Deleuzian take’ on musical time, difference, etc, gives the book a very schematic feel, as though the whole of music were simply there to be placed into the appropriate Deleuzian concept-box. While I’m exaggerating slightly, and Campbell is always quick to note that the approach in the book is simply one among others, it’s a feeling that’s hard to escape given the book’s organisation. Regardless, Music After Deleuze will remain a handy sourcebook for thinking music through Deleuze, and vice versa.

[Alex Delogu · Rating 4 out of 5]

The musical focus here is on contemporary, experimental classical music. Good for musicians looking to understand Deleuze or for Deleuzians looking to understand music. The chapters on pitch and rhythm were highlights for me.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent introduction to some of the influences of Deleuze and a useful overview of contempory classical composers. Strangely little in the way of 'non-academic' music.