In the Aberrant Event of Musical-Philosophical Thought
The event considered as non-actualised (indefinite) is lacking in nothing. It suffices to put it in relation to its concomitants …
— Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life”
…improvisation has little or nothing to do with communication and more to do with ensuring that the channels of communication are kept open and alive.
— Gary Peters, The Philosophy of Improvisation
This presentation brings together live music-making (solo piano) and spoken word to elucidate what I am calling the “aberrant event” of musical-philosophical thought. Specifically, it is concerned with exploring how the relations between music improvisation and a Deleuzian philosophical approach can perform a complex movement of interdisciplinary interrelation from which emerges (concomitantly) new knowledge and knowledge of the new.
Drawing on Deleuze, Bergson, Peters, and my own music-making practice, I argue that in what we understand as the event of performance (in any disciplinary field) there is a differen(t/c)ial movement of complex “becoming,” wherein the “eventness” of the event unfolding is transformed on account of the encounter between the temporal constituents of any unfolding event; to certain extents negating the newness of its perceived novelty, to others, creating precisely the required degree of novelty in order to enable the conditions for future events.
Embracing this notion of the creative event of musical-philosophical nuptiality (however aberrant), I further argue that the categories of music and philosophy, considered as discrete disciplinary fields, are themselves products of an emergent temporal movement: an event of musical-philosophical thought; an “aberrant” event without that which moves but which is ever in motion, immanently creative in its constitution of those “secondary effects” we erroneously take as transcendent givens.