Music as nomad research

Abstract

This essay uses the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of the war machine to develop a way of thinking about research-creation, following Erin Manning’s suggestion that the latter—as a hyphenated compound structure—can function as a knowledge-producing act on its own terms, as a ‘making as thinking’. After considering several examples of musical processes that exemplify this concept (as nomadic conjunctions with ‘State’ apparatuses that rearrange the latter as new knowledge-producing expressions), it engages two moments from Benjamin Boretz’s Language ,as a music as an example of an original expression of research-creation that operates between music and verbal discourse. It closes by considering how this shift in thinking can function as a potent form of radical pedagogy.