Introduction [Music's Immanent Future: The Deleuzian Turn in Music Studies]

Music’s Immanent Future addresses music from multiple perspectives and from a cross-section of scholars. Drawn to musical sound as a powerful form of non-verbal communication, the authors include musicologists, philosophers, music theorists, ethnomusicologists and composers. The chapters assembled in this collection point to the diversity of musical practices and of thinking about those practices in the twenty-first century. The immanent philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, and that of Deleuze in collaboration with Felix Guattari, is mobilised throughout the pages of this book for considering a series of questions about music. The chapters of this collection ask who we are as musicians and how we might encounter music in the rapidly changing world of the twenty-first century. We ponder the ways in which we might reconcile old ways of thinking and writing about music with new ways of thinking that are opened up by Deleuzian philosophy. While not all of the authors in this volume are directly inspired by Deleuzian philosophy, this book as a whole maps out a Deleuzian generative network of relations. In juxtaposing these chapters we intend to demonstrate how their differences can serve a generative function for music scholarship and in particular how they embody a Deleuzian turn in music studies. Our goal in this collection is to demonstrate how Deleuzian thought illuminates the productive potential of these differences for music