Toward a Much Tensor Music Theory
Peter Shelley · Filigrane · 2011
The age-old question of whether music is a language—universal or otherwise—is surely tired enough that it can now be put to rest. Nevertheless, the structural similarities between language and music persist: both exist as an acoustical transmission from one party to another, and both can also exist in a written state. Through their radical re-theorizing of language, both in terms of its function and its component parts, Deleuze and Guattari open new possibilities for understanding how far this similarity between music and language reaches. At the core of language lies the order-word, the compulsion both to obey and to act in an orderly fashion. But like most Deleuzian concepts, the order-word has multiple functions. At its most sinister, it is the death threat; at its most positive, it sets one in flight. This paper will explore the implications of this conception of language for music, taking as examples the American composers John Cage and Steve Reich. Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of language is an analysis of the tensor, an analysis that does not rely on a centered systematicity, but instead expects and opens lines of flight. Examining the tensor in music will provide a Deleuzian mode of analysis that resists both representation and idealization, that attends not to what music is or means, but what it does.