Review of Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt Eds., Sounding the Virtual: Gilles Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music (Ashgate, 2010)

[1] In the hailstorm of recent books concerning the thought of Gilles Deleuze, editors Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt set Sounding the Virtual apart as the first "coherent, comprehensive reply from the field of music studies" (xv).(1) This careful positioning is necessary, as there is already a substantial body of writing treating Deleuze's relationship to music, both from music-centered scholars and from cultural, film, and media studies. This includes Ronald Bogue's 2003 synthesis of Deleuze's writing on music (and painting), Ian Buchanan and Marcel Swiboda's 2004 volume Deleuze and Music, and a four-paper colloquy in Perspectives of New Music from 2008. These last two sources share two authors each with the new volume, and the Buchanan and Swiboda book shares with it a balance between explicating Deleuze, tracing connections and dissonances with related thinkers, and applying the result to musical examples and/or repertories. By comparison, Sounding the Virtual is somewhat more comprehensive, venturing further beyond the connections Deleuze himself made with music. A light editorial hand, however, ensures that Deleuze's pronouncements against totalizing conceptual cohesion are respected. What does distinguish this book is that some chapters (though not all) engage with music theory and analysis in a degree of detail that might (but shouldn't) frighten readers from other disciplines. It's this detail that gives the book its traction, providing substance to sometimes substantial reorientations of Deleuze's ontological and ethical arguments, and demonstrating the potential of those arguments to displace some cherished music-theoretical dogmata.[2] The first three chapters provide complementary perspectives on concepts from Deleuze's Difference and Repetition. Hulse concentrates on the Deleuzian concept of "difference in itself," which asserts that each difference is unique, and cannot be compared to other differences by a rule of measurement (as in many current conceptions of pitch space) or by its relation to an archetype (as in Schenkerian analysis). Sean Higgins recasts difference in terms of information theory as "noise," which he defines as "the absolute difference of empirical sound" (52). Although he is careful to stress the disruptive materiality of "noise," its binary opposition to "signal" brings clarity to his recasting of Deleuze's critique of representation: noise is both the material remainder effaced by categorization, and the friction between our senses and faculties that leads to true thought. Christopher Hasty likewise reprises this critique, but shifts the emphasis from music's materiality to the activity of music, and how we might respect, both conceptually and analytically, the persistence of difference in our musical experiences. The lack of friction between Hastian and Deleuzian discourses is telling, but it falls to Hulse to explicitly position Hasty's work on rhythm as quintessentially Deleuzian, providing the book's most concrete connection between Deleuze and analytical practice. The different conclusions drawn by Hulse and Hasty, however, are striking. For Hulse, rigorously pursuing difference tends to dissolve the identity of genres and media into "huge bodies of resonance" (42). By chapter's end, music's participants are left with a global reservoir of basic musical materials unbound by style, culture, or era-a utopian abrogation that discards music analysis's hard-won hermeneutic utility in a quest for radical connectivity. Hasty's seemingly more conservative position is actually closer to Deleuze: having foresworn representation and categorization, the "realm of Ideas," of true thought, must be nonetheless "differentiated and internally structured" (10). Hasty's solutions provide Ideas including "tonal function" and "beat" with a flexible analytical utility that arises from, rather than in spite of, actual musical becoming. His detailed application of these Ideas to the beginning of Chopin's Scherzo, Op. …