Deleuze and Music
SWIBODA, Marcel. Edinburgh, 2004.
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.
An inexpensive MIDI controller with useful scratch and mixer controls, for DJing, live laptop performance, and VJing? We’ve all been anxious to know whether the BCD2000 delivers. Our resident live visualist gives it a spin (so to speak).
On Sonic Art
WISHART, Trevor. Routledge, 1996.
In this newly revised book On Sonic Art, Trevor Wishart takes a wide-ranging look at the new developments in music-making and musical aesthetics made possible by the advent of the computer and digital information processing. His emphasis is on musical rather than technical matters. Beginning with a critical analysis of the assumptions underlying the Western musical tradition and the traditional acoustic theories of Pythagoras and Helmholtz, he goes on to look in detail at such topics as the musical organization of complex sound-objects, using and manipulating representational sounds and the various dimensions of human and non-human utterance. In so doing, he seeks to learn lessons from areas (poetry and sound-poetry, film, sound effects and animal communication) not traditionally associated with the field of music.
Music, Electronic Media and Culture
EMMERSON, Simon. Ashgate, 2000.
Technology revolutionised the ways that music was produced in the twentieth century. As that century drew to a close and a new century begins a new revolution in roles is underway. The separate categories of composer, performer, distributor and listener are being challenged, while the sounds of the world itself become available for musical use. All kinds of sounds are now brought into the remit of composition, enabling the music of others to be sampled (or plundered), including that of unwitting musicians from non-western cultures. This sound world may appear contradictory - stimulating and invigorating as well as exploitative and destructive. This book addresses some of the issues now posed by the brave new world of music produced with technology.
This Is Our House: House Music, Cultural Spaces and Technologies
RIETVELD, Hillegonda. Ashgate Publishing, 1998.
House music has had a considerable influence in shaping the sound of pop music from the late 1980s onwards. From underground dance events to the pop charts, traces of this aesthetic can be found in many guises. This book is a comparative study which traces a genealogy of house music across England, the Netherlands and US cities, such as Chicago, from the early 1980s to the first half of the ‘90s. In doing so, it maps some of the power structures that are at play in the uses of its specific technologies of production and consumption. The author, Hillegonda Rietveld, was already steeped in dance club culture before she decided to write this loving piece of academic prose about house. Taking critical cultural studies as a vehicle and house music as its aesthetic fuel, she ram raids boundaries of academic disciplines, fusing ideas like a meticulous DJing curator.
