Deleuze ja musiikintutkimus

The project aims at developing new perspectives and methodologies for the study of musicking (music as making, composing, performing and listening social practice; see Small) in the wake of the philosophy outlined by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The project aims at opening and deterritorialising (deterritorialiser) Deleuzian concepts for the audiences of music research.
The project connects closely with the so-called ethical turn of the humanistic studies (Garber et al.). In the study of music, this means creating approaches and conceptualizations that are not preconditioned in terms of any single musical
system or territory (territoire); that do not force musical events into fixed research models but strive to approach their immanence, allowing also new becomings to arise. In this study, ethics also means maximalizing musicking through examining it from different kinds of minoritarian (minoritaire) positions, such as children’s vis-à-vis adults), visually impaired (vis-à-vis visually able), vocality and sound (vis-à-vis visuality), as well as minorities within minorities. These minoritarian positions allow the expansion of the very ontology of music both within Deleuzian discourses as well as music research.
Much of music research has been constructed on different kinds of dichotomies: popular-art; traditional-popular; high-low; ethnomusicology-musicology; researcher-researchee; malefemale; works-performance; diachronic-synchronic; tradition-innovation; tradition-change, etc. Deleuzian thinking challenges and eludes dichotomies because it does not recognize any essences. This is crucial for this project when envisioning new directions and concepts for music research. In particular, the concept of becoming (devenir) encourages thinking how both music and the field of music studies can be re-imagined as multiplicities of difference beyond dichotomized frameworks. Especially interesting is to examine how corporeality of musicking defies dichotomous categorizations.
Finally, Deleuze and Guattari’s way of apprehending music as a power of transformation prompts the examination of the potential lines of flight – unstable vectors that serve both as constituents of a territory and sources of its potential dissolution – within music research: What kinds of lines of flight might the following of the materiality and dynamism of musicking produce for studies of music? What can musicking and music research be and do when approached as becomings?