Politicking Musical Time

Beginning with four irreducibly interrelated themes—that musical time is active, performative, relational, and political—this chapter develops a theory of musical time as an ongoing nexus of events that unfold between performing, listening, and sonorous bodies. It examines the temporal implications of how these different body categories relate affectively, how they co-constitute one another, and how musicking contexts are enacted through their intra-action. The theoretical framework draws upon Jacques Rancière’s conception of political enunciations or enactments and Gilles Deleuze’s three syntheses of time, reading these two conceptual apparatuses productively through one another.