A Thousand Plateaus of Postcolonial Music Education

Social Semiotics, 2003

In the present essay, I apply various concepts associated with the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Fe ´lix Guattari to an inquiry concerning what I call the 'ontology' of musical creation and performance. Specifically, I utilize both the theory and approach of 'schizoanalysis', which so pervasively marks co-operative works such as Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze and Guattari's schizoid becomes the model for my musician-performer. This 'schizoid musician' is the one who has the ability to apprehend that of a 'musical space', a central theme of the essay. Some additional clarification is needed as well. Although I surely offer this essay to the reader as a thoroughly honest, and hopefully provocative, attempt, it is also something of an indebted experiment. That is, the 'after' of my essay's title-as in 'after Deleuze and Guattari'-has essentially two meanings. The first, and obvious meaning: I write after Deleuze and Guattari in that I inherit, to whatever extent, their thought. I grapple with their ideas. The second, and perhaps more unconventionally risky (because potentially easily misconstrued as representative of a kind of blind fidelity): I write after Deleuze and Guattari in the way that a painter paints 'after' another painter, in the way that a composer composes 'after' another composer, and so on. In one sense, the selective utilization of a sensibility associated with the schizophrenic condition provided the 'silent partner' and underlying guiding influence for Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Thus, this essay is, in part, a modest attempt at yet another 'fold' (to use a term of Deleuze's) in a philosophical inquiry-some kind theoretical exemplar of 'difference and repetition' (or, difference in repetition). This indebtedness notwithstanding, the reader will notice the scholarly utilization of Deleuze and Guattari also in terms of a silent partner, a guiding influence, and less in terms of a source that is explicitly acknowledged or referenced. This was an intentional part of the experiment from the beginning. Of course, other thinkers, on the other hand, will come to occupy such a space in the essay. Finally, Deleuze and Guattari believed that one of the chief goals of philosophy was the creation of concepts. In this experiment, I attempt to materialize this idea by articulating an original inquiry that entails both the creation of my own concepts and a stylistic indebtedness to these theorists. No doubt, I was also greatly motivated by the fact that Deleuze and Guattari never gave too much attention to music (despite some intriguing aspects that they attributed to it), and thus there are few

2017

In this article, we expand conceptually upon approaches in cultural musicology and ethnomusicology that conceive of music in terms of shifting textual signs and performances of cultural meaning. 1 Our aim is to propose some new ways of considering music in terms of relational events, doing, and becoming. We ask: what if music does more than symbolically mediate and represent worlds? What if music constantly comes into being and does things as part of intrinsically messy realities that consist of relations between a variety of processes and things: vibrations, sounds, sensations and feelings, human bodies and minds, non-human entities, words and meanings, spaces, movements and materialities, (re)arrangements of social organization and power, and more? How might our conceptions of music, on the one hand, and our methodological stances, on the other, reconfigure if we harness this kind of relational and inherently heterogeneous occurring as a starting point? Our questions are inspired by the process thinking of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and by the work of latter-day theorists who develop this thinking, such as Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook, Rebecca Coleman, Elizabeth Grosz, and Brian Massumi. Deleuze and Guattari's work can be regarded as an effort to contest transcendent ways of thinking. Deleuze and Guattari pursue this aim by aspiring to an ontology that is not grounded upon being but upon the processuality or primary dynamism of reality. In his early sole-authored work Difference and Repetition, Deleuze equates being with becoming by stating that identities only emerge from repetition as difference: "Returning is thus the only identity. .. ; the identity of difference, the identical which belongs to the different, or turns around the different" (1994, 41). This to say that things-whether human subjects, philosophical ideas, or musical formations-are not founded on an essence. Their being, or identity, consists in their processual, and thereby inevitably varying, situationally actualizing, open-ended existence. Being is the effect of (the return of) difference rather than difference being the effect of being (see, for e.g., Deleuze 1994, 41, 55). The order between being and becoming gets overturned. Better

Through outlining two concepts, the ‘idealised musician’ and the ‘immanent musician’, the former representing homogeneity, transcendence and staticity, and the latter being heterogeneous, multiplicital, and always in-process, this paper outlines a distinct approach to musical understanding within Deleuze’s metaphysics. In dialogue with the musicologist and ethnomusicologists Christopher Small and Nick Cook I will identify that each musical tradition holds within it a specific musical ontology which prescribes authenticity within performance, constitution of musical things, and the role of the musician. I will use the term ‘idealised musician’ to describe a conception of a musician who totally embodies and perpetuates a specific musical ontology as though it were universal. Then, in conversation with Georgina Born and through the use of Deleuze’s notion of rhizomes, assemblages, becoming and the refrain, I construct the ‘immanent musician’: the musician entirely formed of connections in flux, enveloping Deleuze’s metaphysics of immanence. Naturally, the paper extends past the musician in an effort to better encompass the immanence of musical performance. This is done through using Eliot Bates’ notion of living organologies in conjunction to Deleuze’s rhizome, where I assert the ‘immanent instrument’ which is metaphysically the same as the immanent musician holdinga constitution of connections in flux. Finally, the paper assesses a more detailed approach of the as- semblage between the immanent instrument and the immanent musician, one which is rooted in the Deleuzian ontology of becoming.

In recent years, music educators have become interested in linking music education practices, programs and projects to issues of social justice. However, theoretical approaches to conceptualizing the problem or to developing strategic interventions have yet to occur within our field. In this paper, I argue that to address social justice we need theoretical tools oriented to injustice, its causes and its manifestations. Addressing injustice means engaging with the political, locating ourselves historically and coming to terms with our implicatedness in injustice.

2013

Abstract : Music theorists Jean Molino and Jean-Jacques Nattiez believe music has a “unity” and a “universality”. They are founded upon man’s biology and his “neuro-cognitive faculties”. On the basis of this assumption they affirm that music has meaning if a human “interpretant” is around to confer meaning on it and deny that music can be meaningful in any other way. To assess the feasibility and creditworthiness of such a theory, this paper adopts an essentially eco-critical perspective. The case is made that founding musical symbolism exclusively on an “anthropological ontology” is problematic, unworkable and, ultimately, disserves the interests of anthropos, the intended beneficiary. It also asks if it is prudent to buy into a purely homocentric musicology in an age when humanity’s poor relations with the natural environment are imperilling our ecological conditions of possibility. Instead of that, it supposes that it would be better to follow the advice of eco-musicologists R. Murray Schafer and use music to give nature a voice and a language and use the intelligence it communicates as a resource for restoring an entente cordiale with our more-than-human surroundings.

2014

In the following study I explore the role of musical practices in the making of different sensibilities. Beginning with the founding of colonial musical institutions in the late nineteenth century in Canada and ending with a consideration of the ideals and subjectivities embodied in a 2008 concert at the Arts and Letters Club of Toronto, I take up the education of feeling as it is rehearsed into being through various musical practices and juxtapose notions of identity with actual material and social relations. Anchored as it is in particular physical locations, my project draws on spatial analysis, discourse analysis and historical contextualization. The study is a genealogy of music education in Canada with music education referring to the institutional settings in which professional musicians and music educators are taught; public school music programs; and public celebrations of national identity in which music is employed with the goal of enjoining participants in particular his...

2019

This dissertation engages the questions and methodologies of phenomenology, the philosophy of culture, the philosophy of music and ethnomusicology in order to investigate the significance of music in human life. The systematic orientation of Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms provides the overarching framework that positions the approach in chapter one. Following Cassirer, art in general and music in particular are not regarded as enjoyable yet dispensable pastimes, but rather as fundamental ways of experiencing the world as intuitive forms and sensations. Establishing the ontological significance of music entails unpacking the sui generis experience of time, space and subjectivity that characterize the musical experience.

Dialogue and Universalism, Vol. XXVIII, No. 4, 2018

In light of recent studies in the phenomenology of music, the essay engages anew in the classical phenomenological controversy over the ideal status of musical works. I argue that musical works are bound idealities. I maintain that the listener's capacity to apperceive physical sounds as musical melodies, which can be repeatedly and intersub-jectively experienced, accounts for the ideality of musical works. Conceived of as bound idealities, musical works 1) are bound to the acts that sustain them; 2) do not have retroactive validity; 3) are inseparable from their reproductions; 4) are modified by the performances. I conclude with some reflections on the importance of bound idealities for the phenomenologically-oriented philosophical anthropology.

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2023

The difficulty of capturing or deciphering music in words is largely why the same questions continue to be asked and the same tensions continue to be explored. Contributors to this special issue add fresh perspectives and new insights to these enduring themes and inquiries, looking at music in both the general sense and examining specific musical pieces, movements, and moments. Each article has its own focus, makes its own arguments, and occupies its own branch(es) of philosophy: ethics, epistemology, metaphysics, politics, and, of course, aesthetics. Beyond the centralizing subject of music, what ties them together and into the best of philosophical traditions is that they not only ask big questions but also, in seeking to answer them, add more questions to the ongoing discourse.