Music Encounter Togetherness

Modern Western musical thought tends to represent music as a thing--a pattern, a structure, even an organism--than as a human practice. Music, Encounter, Togetherness focusses on music as something people do, as a mode of encounter between individuals and cultures, and as an agent of interpersonal and social togetherness. It presents music as a utopian dimension of everyday life.

This is the first volume to mobilize encounters between the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and the rich developments in cultural studies of music and sound. The book takes seriously the intellectual and political challenge that the process philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari poses for previous understandings of music as permanent objects and primarily discursive texts. By elaborating on the concepts of Deleuze and Guattari in innovative ways, the chapters of the book demonstrate how musical and sonic practices and expressions can be reconsidered as instances of becoming, actors in assemblages, and actualizations of virtual tendencies. The collection pushes notions of music and sound beyond such long-term paradigms as identity thinking, the privileging of signification, and the centrality of the human subject. The chapters of the volume bring a range of new topics and methodological approaches in contact with Deleuze and Guattari. These span from movement improvisation, jazz and western art music studies, sound and performance art and reality TV talent shows to deaf musicians and indigenous music. The book also highlights such fresh ways of doing analysis and shaping the methodological tools of music and sound studies that are enabled by Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy. Their philosophy, too, gains renewed capacities and potential when responding to ethnographic, cultural, ethnomusicological, participatory, aesthetic, new materialist, feminist and queer perspectives to music and sound.

Through his experience as a psychologist, a musician, and a spiritual seeker, B.J. Gonzalvo demonstrates the role of music as our guide in recreating inner harmony as well as social harmony. Just like in our gathering songs or opening hymns, music has the transcendent and transformative power to open up our hearts, bring us all together, unite us in harmony, and provide the cadence for our voices and our heartbeats. When we come together with one purpose of making beautiful harmony, there is a sense of elevation of the human spirit up to the heavenly realms where the Divine Author of beauty dwells. Music is more than just a hobby or a soundtrack playing in the background of our lives. Music is an intentional leisure activity full of possibilities for singers and seekers alike to recreate and experience a foretaste of joy, love, hope, grace, and harmony. As we rethink our relationships today, may we remind ourselves of the power of creating and recreating music together for the sake of harmony within ourselves and with one another. Music, the art of togetherness, illuminates the true, the good, and the beautiful in our relationships—relationship to self, to others, and to God. In music, we belong. Through music, we discover our own inner sanctuary as well as the inner sanctuaries in others—the sanctuary where God is made present.

Musicians imagine music by means of functional models which determine certain aspects of the music while leaving others open. This gap between image and the experience it models offers a source of compositional creativity; different musical cultures embody different ways of imagining sound as music. Drawing on psychological and philosophical materials as well as the analysis of specific musical examples, Cook here defines the difference between music theory and aesthetic criticism, and affirms the importance of the "ordinary listener" in musical culture.

In Beyond the Score: Music as Performance, author Nicholas Cook supplants the traditional musicological notion of music as writing, asserting instead that it is as performance that music is loved, understood, and consumed. This book reconceives music as an activity through which meaning is generated in real time, as Cook rethinks familiar assumptions and develops new approaches. Focusing primarily but not exclusively on the Western 'art' tradition, Cook explores perspectives that range from close listening to computational analysis, from ethnography to the study of recordings, and from the social relations constructed through performance to the performing (and listening) body. In doing so, he reveals not only that the notion of music as text has hampered academic understanding of music, but also that it has inhibited performance practices, placing them in a textualist straightjacket. Beyond the Score has a strong historical emphasis, touching on broad developments in twentieth-century performance style and setting them into their larger cultural context. Cook also investigates the relationship between recordings and performance, arguing that we do not experience recordings as mere reproductions of a performance but as performances in their own right. Beyond the Score is a comprehensive exploration of new approaches and methods for the study of music as performance, and will be an invaluable addition to the libraries of music scholars-including musicologists, music theorists, and music cognition scholars-everywhere.

Recent years have seen a rise in interest in the musical ensemble as an exemplary form of creative group behaviour. This volume explores the organisational, psychological, and social processes at play within ensemble music-making.

Rethinking Music reflects the ideas of 24 distinguished musicologists as they evaluate current thinking about music, its social and ethical dimensions and the relationship between academic study and direct musical experience.

Odyssey Works infiltrates the life of one person at a time to create a customtailored, life-altering performance. It may last for one day or a few months and consists of experiences that blur the boundaries of life and art—is that subway mariachi band, used book of poetry, or meal with a new friend real or a part of the performance? Central to this book is their 2013 performance for Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm. His Odyssey lasted four months and included a fake children's book, introducing the themes of his performance, and a cello concert in a Saskatchewan prairie (which Moody almost missed after being stopped at customs with, suspiciously, no idea why he was traveling to Canada). The book includes Moody's interviews with Odyssey Works, an original short story by Amy Hempel, and six proposals for a new theory of making art.