July 08, 2005
Becoming-Still:
Perspectives in Musical Ontology after Deleuze and Guattari
"...In a recording, even more so than in a performance, the intensities of a performance requires more deterritorializing impetus. In a performance, our expectational intensities are more and more transformed by intensities of performance simply by the musical space in which we find ourselves, insofar as there is fullness-to-explosion. In a recording, however, intensities, even expectational ones, are increasingly rooted, as we have suggested, as we come to “learn” the recording. In a performance, we are inevitably deterritorialized, at least initially, at whatever gradation our intensities of expectation at the onset. In a recording, however, we are inevitably handed a reterritorializing card. Recording is a recoding.
With a recording there is a tendency to not only recodify the music, but to recodify ourselves in the process. If we can acknowledge that each time we listen to this particular recorded performance of Varese’s “Ameriques” the music, through whatever intensities and discoveries enthusing us, is not the same, not phenomenologically-in-itself, not the sum of its sounds (in essence, potentially decoding), then the same must be true for ourselves. We bring the difference and singularity of our lives to the operating table each and every time we experience even that same (i.e., recorded) performance of “Ameriques.” This speaks of us more generally that we experience any music at every turn improvisationally. This speaks of music that it is essentially deterritorializing..." From Becoming-Still: Perspectives in Musical Ontology after Deleuze and Guattari by Michael Szekely, The Improvisor: The International Journal on Free Improvisation [via anne]
Posted by jo at July 8, 2005 02:34 PM
