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101Musical Experiments in an Ethics of ListeningIn Valery Vino (ed.), Aesthetic Literacy vol II: out of mind, Mongrel Matter. pp. 116-120. 2023.In what follows I offer some reflections on an ethics of listening, or perhaps more generally a philosophy of listening, that can be discerned in different forms in the experimental music that, since the 1950s, has challenged and radicalised how music is understood. I situate these reflections around three of my own concert experiences as an audience member.
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77Multi-Agential Situations: A View Through John Cage’s Works for Plant MaterialsParallax 28 (4): 442-455. 2023.Where does agency lie in musical performance? How is it expressed? Recent music scholarship has highlighted an increasingly prominent tendency to conceive of agency as not confined to any one individual or type of individual, instead being distributed across diverse individuals that can be found occupying performance situations. . This article uses two ‘percussion’ works from the 1970s by the composer John Cage, Child of Tree (1975) and its multi-performer elaboration Branches (1976), as a foil …Read more
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132Beyond the ‘Last Phenomenology’: Rhythmic Modulations in Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of SensationDeleuze and Guattari Studies 17 (3): 301-325. 2023.This article reconstructs Gilles Deleuze’s engagement with phenomenology, and with the phenomenological problematic of sensation, in his Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Considering Deleuze’s adoption, from the phenomenology of art, of notions of sensation and rhythm, it examines how Deleuze complexifies these phenomenological notions by aligning them with his profoundly non-phenomenological notion of the body without organs, as well as with the concepts of modulation and the diagram. In m…Read more
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254How the performer came to be prepared: Three moments in music’s encounter with everyday technologiesIn Natasha Lushetich, Iain Campbell & Dominic Smith (eds.), Contingency and plasticity in everyday technologies, Rowman & Littlefield. pp. 125-41. 2023.What kind of technology is the piano? It was once a distinctly everyday technology. In the bourgeois home of the nineteenth century it became an emblematic figure of gendered social life, its role shifting between visually pleasing piece of furniture, source of light entertainment, and expression of cultured upbringing. It performed this role unobtrusively, acting as a transparent mediator of social relations. To the composer of concert music it was, and sometimes still is, says Samuel Wilson, l…Read more
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16Contingency and plasticity in everyday technologies (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield. 2023.This book theorises technology and its host of social, material, and epistemic transformation techniques, tools, and methods as indeterminate through sixteen methodologically diverse contributions from media philosophy, art and architectural theory, mathematics, computer science, and anthropology scholars.
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328Rhythm and Signification: temporalities of musical and social meaningAngelaki 27 (5): 56-78. 2022.Rhythm is generally taken to refer to a temporal pattern of events. Yet in recent years, across diverse fields in the arts, humanities, and social sciences, it has come to serve as the conceptual marker for a wide range of new approaches to understanding relations and relationality, following most explicitly from the late work of Henri Lefebvre. This article explores the temporal aspect of such relational thinking, in particular asking how time is implicated in relations, and how it can be meani…Read more
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252Sounds Flush with the Real: Mixed Semiotic Strategies in Post-Cagean Musical ExperimentalismIn Paulo de Assis & Paolo Giudici (eds.), Machinic Assemblages of Desire: Deleuze and Artistic Research 3, Leuven University Press. pp. 107-114. 2021.When beginning to think about the relation between experimental music and the thought of Gilles Deleuze, this quotation seems to be a natural starting point. In Deleuze and Guattari’s affirmation of this phrase from John Cage they suggest a resonance between music and philosophy: in both fields the experimental approach entails a dismantling of predetermining codes and hierarchies, and with this arises the opportunity for an open-endedness that accommodates singular events and encounters. This u…Read more
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238Normativity at the edge of reason - review of Cecile Malaspina, An Epistemology of Noise (review)Radical Philosophy 9 93-96. 2021.In recent years noise seems to have become an interdisciplinary concept par excellence, apt to capturing important dynamics at work whether in technological, scientific, social, or aesthetic domains. But when economists, biologists, psychologists, and musicians speak of noise, are they really all referring to the same thing? In An Epistemology of Noise Cecile Malaspina takes this dispersion of the notion of noise as a starting point, and moreover accepts that, when removed from its mathematical …Read more
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479Improvisation, Indeterminacy, and Ontology: Some Perspectives on Music and the PosthumanitiesContemporary Music Review 40 (4): 409-424. 2021.In this article I address some questions concerning the emerging conjunction of musical research on improvisation and work in the ‘posthumanities’, in particular the theoretical results of the ‘ontological turn’ in the humanities. Engaging with the work of the composer John Cage, and George E. Lewis’s framing of Cage’s performative indeterminacy as a ‘Eurological’ practice that excludes ‘Afrological’ jazz improvisation, I examine how critical discourse on Cage and his conception of sound is rele…Read more
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14Distributed Perception: Resonances and AxiologiesRoutledge. 2021.Contributors to this book include key theorists and practitioners from media theory, Native Science, bio-media and sound art, philosophy, art history and design informatics. Collectively, they examine the becoming-technique of animal-human- machinic perceptibilities; and micro-perceptions that lie beneath the threshold of known perceptions yet create energetic vibrations. Who, what, and where perceives, and how? What are the sedimentations, inscriptions and axiologies of animal, human and machin…Read more
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314Structuralist heroes and points of heresy: recognizing Gilles Deleuze’s (anti-)structuralismContinental Philosophy Review 55 (2): 215-234. 2021.This article is concerned with the status and stakes of Gilles Deleuze’s “break” with structuralism. With a particular focus on a transitional text of Deleuze, the 1967/1972 article “How Do We Recognize Structuralism?,” it asks how Deleuze understood structuralism and why, after his encounter with Félix Guattari and Guattari’s own transitional text, 1969’s “Machine and Structure,” Deleuze felt the need to break with structuralism. It argues that reading these two texts together allows us to see …Read more
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470Sonic obstacles and conceptual nostalgia: preliminary considerations on musical conceptualism and contemporary artPhilosophical Inquiries 9 (2): 111-132. 2021.This paper is concerned with the aesthetic and discursive gap between music and contemporary art, and the recent attempts to remedy this in the field of New Music through a notion of “New Conceptualism.” It examines why, despite musical sources being central to the emergence of conceptual artistic strategies in the 1950s and ’60s, the worlds of an increasingly transmedial “generic art” and music have remained largely distinct. While it takes New Music’s New Conceptualism as its focus, it argues …Read more
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1323Sound’s Matter: ‘Deleuzian Sound Studies’ and the Problems of Sonic MaterialismContemporary Music Review 39 (5): 618-637. 2020.This article evaluates the theoretical and practical grounds of recent debates around Christoph Cox’s realist project of a ‘sonic materialism’ by returning to Gilles Deleuze, a key theoretical resource for Cox. It argues that a close engagement with Deleuze’s work in fact challenges many of the precepts of Cox’s sonic materialism, and suggests a rethinking of materialism in the context of music. Turning to some aspects of Deleuze’s work neglected by Cox, the ‘realist’ ontological inquiry Cox aff…Read more
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1029“Things begin to speak by themselves”: Pierre Schaeffer’s myth of the seashell and the epistemology of soundSound Studies 7 (1): 100-118. 2021.This paper considers the role of myth and phenomenology in Pierre Schaeffer’s research into music and sound, and argues that engagement with these themes allows us to rethink the legacy and contemporary value of Schaeffer’s thought in sound studies. In light of critique of Schaeffer’s project, in particular that developed by Brian Kane and Schaeffer’s own apparent self-disavowal, this paper returns to Schaeffer’s early remarks on the “myth of the seashell” in order to examine the conditions of t…Read more
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19This text has already been published, in La Deleuziana – online journal of philosophy – n. 10 / 2019 – rhythm, chaos and nonpulsed man.: I propose in this text a rhythmic theory of signs drawn from the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I name this theory a semiorhythmology. I suggest that the theory of rhythm developed in A Thousand Plateaus can be understood, in part, as the culmination of the diverse set of inquiries into signs that both Deleuze and Guattari - Philosophie – Nouvel …Read more
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447Deleuze and Guattari’s Semiorhythmology: A Sketch for a Rhythmic Theory of Signsla Deleuziana 10 351-370. 2019.I propose in this text a rhythmic theory of signs drawn from the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I name this theory a semiorhythmology. I suggest that the theory of rhythm developed in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) can be understood, in part, as the culmination of the diverse set of inquiries into signs that both Deleuze and Guattari undertook, individually and together, beginning in the 1960s. I first outline Deleuze’s theory of signs as a theory of encounter as developed in Proust a…Read more
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697Avant-Gardes, Afrofuturism, and Philosophical Readings of RhythmIn Reynaldo Anderson & Clinton R. Fluker (eds.), The Black Speculative Arts Movement: Black Futurity, Art+Design, Lexington Books. pp. 27-49. 2019.Here I will put forward a claim about rhythm – that rhythm is relation. To develop this I will explore the entanglement of and antagonism between two notions of the musical avant-garde and its theorization. The first of these is derived from the European classical tradition, the second concerns Afrodiasporic musical practices. This essay comes in two parts. The first will consider some music-theoretical and philosophical ideas about rhythm in the post-classical avant-garde. Here I will explore…Read more
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932Bachelard and Deleuze on and with Experimental Science, Experimental Philosophy, and Experimental MusicIn Guillaume Collett (ed.), Deleuze, Guattari, and the Problem of Transdisciplinarity, Bloomsbury. pp. 73-104. 2019.In this chapter I look at some questions around the notion of experimentation in philosophy, science, and the arts, through the thought of Gaston Bachelard and Gilles Deleuze. My argument is articulated around three areas of enquiry – Bachelard’s work on the experimental sciences, Deleuze’s notion of philosophy as an experimental practice, and recent musicological debate around the practical and political stakes of the term ‘experimental music’. By drawing together these three senses of experime…Read more
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11Reviews: 'Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today' (2017), by T.J. Demos; 'Nonhuman Photography' (2017), by Joanna Zylinska; 'Beyond the Witness: Holocaust Representation and the Testimony of Images, Three Films by Yael Hersonski, Harun Farocki and Eyal Sivan' (2018), by Rebecca Katz Thor (review)Philosophy of Photography 9 (2): 217-230. 2018.Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today, T. J. Demos (2017) Berlin: Sternberg Press, 132 pp., ISBN 978-3-95679-210-6, p/bk, £18.00 Becoming a camera Nonhuman Photography, Joanna Zylinska (2017) Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 272 pp., ISBN 978-0-26203-702-0, h/bk, £35.00 Beyond the Witness: Holocaust Representation and the Testimony of Images, Three Films by Ya el Hersonski, Harun Fa rocki and Eyal Siva n Rebecka Katz Thor (2018) Stockholm: Art and Theory Publishing, …Read more
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209Review of Joe Panzner (2015), The Process That Is the World: Cage/Deleuze/Events/Performances (review)Deleuze and Guatarri Studies 12 (3): 444-453. 2018.
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1863John Cage, Gilles Deleuze, and the Idea of SoundParallax 23 (3): 361-378. 2017.In this essay we will take the American experimental composer John Cage’s understanding of sound as the starting point for an evaluation of that term in the field of sound studies. Drawing together two of the most influential figures in the field, Cage’s thought and work will serve as a lens through which to engage with recent debate concerning the uptake in sound studies of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. In so doing we will attempt to develop a path between conflicting sides of sound studies…Read more
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45Experimental practices of music and philosophy in John Cage and Gilles DeleuzeDissertation, . 2015.In this thesis we construct a critical encounter between the composer John Cage and the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. This encounter circulates through a constellation of problems found across and between mid-twentieth century musical, artistic, and philosophical practices, the central focus for our line of enquiry being the concept of experimentation. We emphasize the production of a method of experimentation through a practice historically situated with regards to the traditions of the respectiv…Read more
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