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

Edward Campbell

University of Aberdeen, UK

The Dark Precursor and the Musics of the World

Day 2, 10 November, De Bijloke Kraakhuis, 11:00–12:00

In a musical context, Deleuze’s concept of the Dark Precursor stimulates us to consider a range of ways in which heterogeneous, intensive systems can be related, thereby enabling communication or, to use later Deleuze–Guattarian terminology, “consistency.” The words “fusion” and “crossover” are regularly used to cover that growing multiplicity of cases where previously independent musics encounter one another as forces, in ever-variable plays of give and take. Such is the case in the fusions of Indian and various Western musics pioneered by musicians such as Ali Akbar Khan, Ravi Shankar, John Coltrane, George Harrison, John Mayer, and Joe Harriott, and more recently Anoushka Shankar. An alternative example is the Mugham-based jazz of Azerbaijani musician Aziza Mustafah-Zadeh, but the examples could be multiplied ad infinitum. Alternatively, in the case of Western art music in France, the experience of the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris was pivotal in expediting much more intimate engagements between Western composers and a range of other world musics, which went beyond the nineteenth-century interest in exotica. Exposure to the Javanese gamelan and the Annamite theatre was of great importance for Debussy. André Jolivet and Olivier Messiaen were seriously affected by the sound of the gamelan heard once again at the Exposition Coloniale in 1931. Messiaen’s music is marked by Greek and Hindu rhythms, a range of pitch modes, Eastern-sounding instrumental groups, and a sense of temporal stasis that he related to Japan. Pierre Boulez’s early ethnomusicological aspirations, his contact with Messiaen and ethnologist André Schaeffner, and his lifelong interest in aspects of Asian and African music are apparent in his own work. An interest in and inclusion of aspects of Asian and African musics is also found in the work of younger composers, such as Hugues Dufourt’s monumental Erewhon (1972–76) for percussion or Georges Aperghis’s opera Tristes Tropiques (1990–95).

Viewing this series of musical encounters and inseminations, the challenge then is to think the Deleuzian Dark Precursors that operate between global musical traditions. The range of music considered in the talk embodies varying degrees of fusion between forces. Given that every viable composition or improvisation can be viewed as the work of consistency, the question arises, is consistency absolute or are there degrees of consistency? Who can judge whether a musical experience achieves Deleuzian consistency? Is the fact of its existence sufficient guarantee? Does consistency imply molecularity? Are less molecular forces less consistently integrated within the work? Finally, to what degree do compositions/improvisations of varying consistency manifest different values and relations?

Edward Campbell is Senior Lecturer in Music at the University of Aberdeen and co-director of the university’s Centre for Modern Thought. He specialises in contemporary European art music and aesthetics including historical, analytical, and aesthetic approaches to European modernism, the music and writings of Pierre Boulez, contemporary European opera, and the interrelation of musical thought and critical theory. He is the author of the books Boulez, Music and Philosophy (CUP, 2010) and Music after Deleuze (Bloomsbury, 2013) and co-editor/contributor to Pierre Boulez Studies (CUP, forthcoming 2016). He is currently working as co-editor on The Cambridge Stravinsky Encyclopedia as well as on a monograph on the importance of Asian and African music in French music since Debussy.

Email: e.campbell@abdn.ac.uk