8 - Affect, Play and Becoming-Musicking
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 April 2021
Summary
Deleuze's thought cannot but revolt the pedagogue who dislikes his irony, his humour, his gaiety, his endless games, and above all fears the uproar of chaos. (Villani 2006: 231)
What combines nominal concepts and concepts of freedom better than a song? (Deleuze 1994: 292)
Music theorist Jonathan Kramer begins his influential volume The Time of Music (1988) with a quote from perhaps an unlikely source: cognitive science and AI researcher Marvin Minsky. Minsky writes,
Of what use is music-knowledge? Here is one idea. Each child spends endless days in curious ways; we call it ‘play.’ He plays with blocks and boxes, stacking them and packing them; he lines them up and knocks them down. What is that all about? Clearly, he is learning Space! But how, on earth, does one learn Time? Can one Time fit inside another, can two of Them go side by side? In Music we find out!
Many adults retain that play-like fascination with making large structures out of smaller things – and one way to understand music involves building large mind-structures out of smaller music-things. So that drive to build music-structure might be the same one that makes us try to understand the world. (Minsky 1982: 5; cited in Kramer 1988: 1)
Kramer describes Minsky's ruminations as ‘whimsical’, and they are, marvellously so. He misreads Minsky's point, however, when he characterises it as an account of how (or suggesting that) ‘time makes music meaningful’ (Kramer 1988: 1). How so? Partly because he could just as easily have arrived at the conclusion that music makes time meaningful, but more so because to assert that time makes music meaningful is to suggest that music does or can exist somehow outside of time; that time is a predicate or quality that can be added to music in order to vivify it. As Christopher Small insists, music does not exist outside its enactment (1998: 6–9); another way to say this is that music is irreducible from its temporal extension, which is to say through the temporally constitutive relational forces that produce a musicking context – this is true whether one believes that music exists in time or that (musical) time is produced through the enactment of events; through the cut into future that Deleuze characterises as his third synthesis of time.
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- Deleuze and Children , pp. 145 - 161Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018