Deterritorialize Yourself! (Four Meta-Musical Vignettes for John Rahn)

Abstract

I made my first deep dive into both Deleuze and Guattari and J.K. I Randall’s work at around the same time, and through the same source: John Rahn’s seminars on analytical personae and critical theory at the University of Washington in the mid-2000s. It was also in one of these seminars that I first began thinking seriously about how one might go about critically, analytically, theoretically, and politically engaging musical improvisation, as well as, more generally, how to think musically: that is, how to make thinking about music be more like music.1 In order to clarify this last point, we might read four statements of John's alongside one another: 1. All discourse is “committed” to forming the world that it is about, so that it behooves the musician to make discourse about music like music, at least in the essential quality of rich particu-larity, and perhaps in all five of Nelson Goodman’s “symptoms of the aesthetic” . . . : semantic density, syntactical density, relative repleteness, exemplification, and multiple and complex reference.2 2. At the in-time extreme is an obsessive concern for the way in which, at every musical time, events immediately following that time grow out of events preceding that time. Such an explanation would consist of as many explanations as there are moments of musical time in a piece . . . plus an explanation of the way all so-experienced piece-moments integrate into the entire piece.3 3. [following a select list of Heraclitus aphorisms] Musicians, he is speaking to us! The vagabonds of the night, the magicians, the bacchantes, the inspired! Clearly this is a different voice. . . . Music flows, and swirls madly.4 4. The advantage of semigroups and monoids over groups as a general model for machines is that not all machines can run backwards. Indeed, if we want to model musical acts as taking place in irreversible time, we will need to escape groups and inhabit monoids.5 Among many other take-aways, these maxims suggest to me a tem-poral effervescence, a commitment to understanding (and describing) music from within the ongoing practice of its enactment, a productive conflation of rational and mystical, and an attitude toward trans-formational thinking that escapes both the ontological fixity of Being and the formalist apparatus of homomorphic group functions.6 It is important to note that John in no way is taking a hard line with any of the positions articulated or implied in these quotes; each is intended as an image of thought, a provocation to get us thinking about how we think about music, to imagine other perspectives and refine the ones we’re already engaged in. Time and change (and discourse about time and change): these are the themes that have animated the way I think about doing music theory. What follows are four loosely related meta-musical vignettes, nominally about theorizing music-improvisation (and, to a degree, about Deleuze), but ducking and weaving through many ancillary themes, all rhizomatically connected, but also all forming a single quasi-improvisational narrative.