Paulo Assis

What are musical works? How are they constructed in our minds? Which material things allow us to speak about them in the first place? Does a specific way of conceiving musical works limit their performative potentials? What alternative, more productive images of musical work can be devised? 'Virtual Works--Actual Things' addresses contemporary music ontological discourses, challenging dominant musicological accounts, questioning their authoritative foundation and moving towards dynamic perspectives devised by music practitioners and artist researchers. Specific attention is given to the relationship between the virtual multiplicities that enable the construction of an image of a musical work and the actual, concrete materials that make such a construction possible. With contributions by prominent scholars, this book is a wide-ranging and fascinating collection of essays, which will be of great interest for artistic research, contemporary musicology, music philosophy, performance studies and music pedagogy alike.

Aberrant Nuptials' explores the diversity and richness of the interactions between artistic research and Deleuze studies. "Aberrant nuptials" is the expression Gilles Deleuze uses to refer to productive encounters between systems characterised by fundamental difference. More than imitation, representation, or reproduction, these encounters foster creative flows of energy, generating new material configurations and intensive experiences. Within different understandings of artistic research, the contributors to this book - architects, composers, film-makers, painters, performers, philosophers, sculptors, and writers - map current practices at the intersection between music, art, and philosophy, contributing to an expansion of horizons and methodologies. Written by established Deleuze scholars who have been working on interferences between art and philosophy, and by musicians and artists who have been reflecting Deleuzian and Post-Deleuzian discourses in their artworks, this volume reflects the current relevance of artistic research and Deleuze studies for the arts.

The concept of assemblage has emerged in recent decades as a central tool for describing, analysing, and transforming dynamic systems in a variety of disciplines. Coined by Deleuze and Guattari in relation to different fields of knowledge, human practices, and nonhuman arrangements, “assemblage” is variously applied today in the arts, philosophy, and human and social sciences, forming links not only between disciplines but also between critical thought and artistic practice. Machinic Assemblages focuses on the concept’s uses, transpositions, and appropriations in the arts, bringing together the voices of artists and philosophers that have been working on and with this topic for many years with those of emerging scholar-practitioners. The volume embraces exciting new and reconceived artistic practices that discuss and challenge existing assemblages, propose new practices within given assemblages, and seek to invent totally unprecedented assemblages.

This article sketches a new image of musical works, situated beyond the «work concept», critically rethinking existing music ontologies, and grounded on Gilles Deleuze’s central ontological commitments. After situating the problem, the paper discusses current issues in music ontology, explores specific Deleuzian and Deleuzo-Guattarian ontological concepts, and argues for a new image of musical works, which are more aptly described as assemblages, as highly complex, historically constructed multiplicities defined by virtual structures, intensive processes, and actual things.

Transduction is Gilbert Simondon’s key concept for understanding processes of differentiation and of individuation in a number of fields, including scientific disciplines, social and human sciences, technological devices, and artistic domains. Originating from the sciences and crucially developed in its philosophical implications by Simondon, transduction refers to a dynamic operation by which energy is actualized, moving from one state to the next, in a process that individuates new materialities. This chapter appropriates this concept for musical practice, aiming at establishing a foundational conceptual layer for a broader research effort that crucially includes artistic practice—both composition and performance—as its starting and end points. After an introductory depiction of what transduction might mean for a music performer, this paper focuses on the presentation of different definitions of transduction, mainly stemming from Simondon himself, but including two further extensions: one to Deleuze’s concept of haecceity, the other to Brian Massumi’s notion of corporeality. Keeping in mind the potential of these definitions for the making of music, this essay explores eight different, yet complementary ways of thinking transduction, which are presented in a growing scale of complexity from the incandescent light bulb to the intricacies of decision-making in living organisms, passing by the question of time and temporality, thermodynamics, information theory, a redesigned theory of haecceities, Riemannian topology, and corporeality. All these topics are presented here in short, as opening gates to wider fields of inquiry, suggesting future avenues of research, rather than claiming to offer finished thought.