T H E D A R K
P R E C U R S O R
International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research
DARE 2015 | Orpheus Institute | Ghent | Belgium | 9-11 November 2015
O P E N - A C C E S S R I C H - M E D I A P R O C E E D I N G S
Edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici
T H E D A R K
P R E C U R S O R
International Conference on Deleuze and Artistic Research
DARE 2015 | Orpheus Institute | Ghent | Belgium | 9-11 November 2015
O P E N - A C C E S S R I C H - M E D I A P R O C E E D I N G S
Edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici
Clara Maïda
Independent composer, Paris, FR | Berlin, DE
For a Nanomusic—“Sound Desiring Machines” and Multiple Time
Day 2, 10 November, De Bijloke Kraakhuis, 16:30-17:00
Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts had an important impact on my musical thinking. When I started reading both philosophers, I had been working for several years at the intersection of musical writing and psychoanalysis. In Order of Release, Border of Relish (2002–4), I developed a transversal between musical time and the time of the unconscious. Echoes, resonances, and rebounds between sound fragments build a complex and non-linear temporal form. Processes of condensation or dissolution induce a mutative and elastic musical matter with heterochronic textures, a multiplicity of strata, and transitory sound objects.
When I read Deleuze and Guattari, it occurred to me that the minimal units I was combining in ever changing sound constellations—their capacity for connection and propagation through the sound field—could be referred to the “asignifying” particles of the “machinic unconscious (Guattari 1979; Deleuze and Guattari 1980). In my music, small modular three-pitch pendular figures are the elementary constituents of a sound “abstract machine,” and are pushed by antagonistic forces: stratification or “destratification,” “territorialisation” or “deterritorialisation” (Deleuze and Guattari 1980), repetition or mutation.
These pendulums, with their modular quality and their constant pivoting movement, keep forming evolving “assemblages” (Deleuze 1964; Deleuze and Guattari 1980) whose ramifications (chains of interconnected pendulums) can either converge towards one centre, such as Guattari’s “black hole” [Guattari 1979], with the condensation on one object or figure, or create independent lines and migrate toward other zones. Since they keep circulating and building ever renewing fleeting configurations, they can be considered as sound “desiring machines” (Deleuze and Guattari 1972). In these sound rhizomes (Deleuze and Guattari 1980), repetition has an important function. It is a step-by-step process. Each repetition of a pendulum alters its envelope, generates a small gap, a small differance (Derrida 1967). It is a “differentiating repetition” (Deleuze 1968). Being caught in a permanent flow, these elementary figures both repeat and mute, simultaneously form and dissolve. This formal paradox characterises all my pieces. Abstract figures are elaborated only in order to show that they can be undone, that they are plays of forces. They are perceptible only because they insist. Their appearance/disappearance reveals not only a “capture of forces” (Deleuze 1981) but also the paradoxical “becoming” of a present that suggests before and after, past and future, “Aion” (Deleuze 1969) or the “empty form of time” (Deleuze 1968)—time as a pure process.
The musical form is not preformed; it is the result of the sound trajectories, of different “becomings” according to the different pieces.
Psyché-Cité/Transversales (2005–7) is a psychogeography. The sound topology is both a becoming-machine and a becoming-scream, a “zone of indiscernibility” (Deleuze 1981) between the brain and the metro, the psyche and the city, scream and noise. It is a hybrid sound territory. Mutatis mutandis (2008) is a whole set of vibrations. Fluxes of particles coagulate or trace more or less dense migratory paths. It is “musical genetics,” with repetitions and errors (such as DNA). It is a becoming-filament and a becoming-molecule. Shel(l)ter (2009–10) refers to an atomic bunker in Berlin and to nuclear physics. It is a becoming-atom, a “nanomusic.”
From the Body Without Organs (Deleuze 1981; Deleuze and Guattari 1972, 1980), a kind of “organum-body” underlies my music topographies—that is, a never definite and never stabilised sound body since the invested vibratory fields are never frozen.
References
Deleuze, Gilles. 1964. Proust et les signes. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
————. 1968. Différence et répétition. Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
————. 1969. Logique du sens. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
————. 1981. Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation. Paris: Editions de la Différence.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1972. L’anti-Œdipe. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
————. 1980. Mille plateaux. Paris: Editions de Minuit.
Derrida, Jacques. 1967. L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Guattari, Félix. 1979. L’inconscient machinique: Essais de schizo-analyse. Paris: Recherches.
Clara Maïda is a French composer who has lived both in Paris and in Berlin since she was the guest of the Artists-in-Berlin programme of the DAAD. She has studied music and psychology and attended the composition courses of H. Lachenmann, P. Manoury, T. Murail, G. Grisey, and M. Stroppa at the Acanthes Centre and at the Paris Superior Conservatory of Music. She has received several international awards and grants such as the Berlin Senat and Paris Hors Les Murs grants, the Stuttgart and Berlin-Rheinsberger composition first prizes (Germany), an honorary mention at Prix Ars Electronica (Austria), as well as many commissions from institutions and festivals in France and Germany. Her pieces have been performed by numerous contemporary music ensembles around the world and broadcast on radio in several countries. She has given lectures in different institutions in Europe, New York, and Australia and two CDs of her works have been released (DAAD/Edition RZ, Berlin; Metamkine Label/Marseille GMEM).
Web: http://www.claramaida.com. Email: clara.maida@club-internet.fr