Escaping Meaning, Escaping Music

Abstract

expressionist or not (I’m thinking of certain pieces from the Cobra group). (Lyotard 1992, 141) Even more directly, Deleuze and Guattari’s theorization of the “minor” has its foundation in music and is a deviation from Romanticism. The minor is neither lesser, nor outside, but a deflection from within the major that can be released from its nineteenth-century and human modes to become (as with Lyotard) a form of synthesis that is not that of a subject: It is true that the minor “mode” gives tonal music a decentered, runaway, fugitive character due to the nature of its intervals and the lesser stability of its chords. This mode thus has the ambiguity of undergoing operations that align it to a major model or standard at the same time as it continues to display a certain modal power (puissance) irreducible to tonality, as though music set out on a journey and garnered all resurgences, phantoms of the Orient, imaginary lands, traditions from all over. But temperament, tempered chromaticism has an even greater ambiguity: stretching the action of the center to the most distant tones, but also preparing the disaggregation of the central principle, replacing the centered forms of continuous development with a form that constantly dissolves and transforms itself. When development subordinates form and spans the whole, as in Beethoven, variation begins to free itself and becomes identified with creation. But when chromaticism is unleashed, becomes a generalized chromaticism, turns back against temperament, affecting not only pitches but all sound components—durations, intensities, timbre, attacks—it becomes impossible to speak of a sound form organizing matter; it is no longer even possible to speak of a continuous development of form. Rather, it is a question of a highly complex and elaborate material making audible nonsonorous forces. The couple matter-form is replaced by the coupling material-forces. The synthesizer has taken the place of the old “a priori synthetic judgment,” and all functions change accordingly. By placing C l a i r e C o l e b r o o k 1 1