Deleuze and Music

What would a Deleuzian music philosophy be like? For Deleuze, music informed his work on several levels. Deleuze and Music is the first volume to explore Deleuze's ideas from the perspective of music and sound. Music is central to Deleuze's work from Difference and Repetition to the Logic of Sense to Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature and A Thousand Plateaus (both written with Félix Guattari). Music and sound-based problems contribute a great deal to the originality and singularity of Deleuze's thought. The essays in this volume explore a variety of issues and their relevance to key debates in ethics, aesthetics, politics, epistemology and the history of ideas. Collectively they demonstrate how music functions in Deleuze's work and explore his ideas of melody, rhythm, harmony, counterpoint and the refrain. This background provides a frame of reference for his immanent ontology, his Spinozist ethology and his (and Guattari's) politics of the 'people yet to come'. Music proves to be the exemplary medium for exploring and developing his 'rhizomatic' conception of thought. The volume provides a much-needed addition to the growing body of secondary work on Deleuze and will be of interest to students and researchers working across a diverse range of disciplines, from philosophy and cultural and critical theory to art history, musicology and ethnomusicology.

Ian Buchanan is Director of the Institute for Social Transformation Research, University of Wollongong. He is the author of A Reader's Guide to Anti-Oedipus and Deleuzism: A Metacommentary, and Editor of the journal Deleuze Studies. Marcel Swiboda is an Associate Lecturer in the School of Fine Art, History of Art & Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. He is reviews editor of Parallax, a journal in philosophical Cultural Studies.

Contents; Introduction: Deleuze and Music; Ian Buchanan; 1 Studies in Applied Nomadology: Jazz Improvisation and Post-Capitalist Markets; Eugene Holland; 2 Is Pop Music?; Greg Hainge; 3 Deleuze, Adorno, and the Composition of Musical Multiplicity; Nick Nesbitt; 4 Affect and Individuation in Popular Electronic Music; Drew Hemment; 5 Violence in Three Shades of Metal: Death, Doom and Black; Ronald Bogue; 6 Becoming-Music: The Rhizomatic Moment of Improvisation; Jeremy Gilbert; 7 Rhythm: Assemblage and Event; Phil Turetsky; 8 What I Hear is Thinking Too: The Deleuze Tribute Recordings; Timothy S. Murphy; 9 Music and the Socio-Historical Real: Rhythm, Series and Critique in Deleuze and O. Revault D'Allonnes; Jean-Godefroy Bidima; 10 Cosmic Strategies: The Electric Experiments of Miles Davis; Marcel Swiboda; Notes on Contributors; Index.