immanence

A lot has been written about music and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze: for instance, on Deleuze and music theory, on music after Deleuze, and on Deleuze’s “Thought-Music,” and there’ve been some valiant efforts to put Deleuze to music, like this one, this one, and this one, and several related to Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus, including an entire record label.

Not nearly as much has been done with the writings of Alfred North Whitehead. If we take his three key late-period books of metaphysics — Process and Reality, Adventures of Ideas, and Modes of Thought — we find, to my knowledge, only a handful of albums named after them: free saxophonist Evan Parker’s Process and Reality, the collaboration of the same title by Richard Pinhas, Tatsuya Yoshida, and Merzbow/Masami Akita (which I wrote about here), Steve Bicknell’s EP Modes of Thought, and an album by Anu BlonDee that may or may not be titled after the latter book as well (with track titles like “Mahjong Tea” and “It Ain’t Ova,” I’m not convinced). There’s nothing named after Adventures of Ideas, which could be because it, like most of Whitehead’s books, wasn’t particularly adventurously named. Process and Reality remains his most compelling title (and still awaits a beer named after it, which Difference and Repetition has long had).

If there’s any generalization we can make about music inspired by either Deleuze or Whitehead, it’s that their work appeals especially to electronic musicians (all the Mille Plateaux folks, Bicknell, maybe BlonDee), free jazzers (Evan Parker), and those populating the experimental terrain between the two genres (Pinhas and his collaborators). (My own efforts — tracks like this one and a few others, rather than full albums — are in a more minimalist vein, but the inspiration has generally been free-jazzy.)

It’s a bit surprising to me that no well-known 20th century composer shows any clear and documented influence from Whitehead’s philosophy. You’d think, for instance, that Schoenbergian twelve-tonalism would have been influenced by Whitehead’s earlier or middle period writings on science and relativity.

Whitehead has been applied to interpreting Schoenberg’s music, and to various other musicians and composers, from Carl Orff and John Coltrane to Bob Dylan and hiphop. He’s also been applied more generally to musical composition, musical performance, and musical listening and interpretation. Whitehead was a key influence on Suzanne Langer’s philosophy of music, and on some other philosophers who write about music (like Steven Shaviro). Among the more interesting applications of Whitehead to musicology is Kenneth Lefave’s The Sound of Ontology, though it’s far from strictly Whiteheadian in its premises.

But none of those show a direct influence on music making.

There is one contemporary composer who’s a Whitehead scholar and whose compositions reflect his influence. His name is Richard Elfyn Jones. I first read about him here and then read this theoretical piece he wrote on Whitehead and music. In that article, Jones quotes philosopher F. David Martin writing (in this 1967 piece) that “Music more than any other art is perceived mainly in the mode of causal efficacy. Abstract painting more than any other art is perceived mainly in the mode of presentational immediacy.” (I summarize the differences between “causal efficacy” and “presentational immediacy” here.)

Martin continues:

Music more than any other art forces us to feel causal efficacy, the compulsion of process, the dominating control of the physically given over possibilities throughout the concrescence of an experience. The form of music binds the past and future and present so tightly that as we listen we are thrust out of the ordinary modes of experience, in which time rather than temporality dominates. Ecstatic temporality, the rhythmic unity of past-present-future, is the most essential manifestation of the Being of human beings. [emphases added]

Jones adds that “music can make us feel process directly, since musical notes are presented successively,” and that music’s abstract nature means that its meanings are “embodied” rather than “designative” or “representational.”

That Jones’s own music is fairly traditional (you can hear some of it, from a Whiteheadian titled series “Lures for Feeling,” here) doesn’t take away from the argument that music is more process-relational, in the sense suggested above, than the other arts.

All of that makes it pretty surprising to me that Whitehead’s influence on music is much less evident than it was on the mid 20th century literary and artistic avant-garde. The latter was demonstrated in Daniel Belgrad’s book The Culture of Spontaneity: Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 1998), which devoted an entire chapter to Whitehead’s importance for a line of writers and painters including Charles Olson, William Carlos Williams, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, and Lee Krasner.

Belgrade’s subtitled reference to improvisation is where I’m going with this: I have found almost no references to Whitehead’s influence in the world of jazz. Sun Ra, who read everyone from Swedenborg, Blavatsky, and Gurdjieff to all manner of Black nationalists, Egyptologists, and other philosophers, did not seem to have ever referred to Whitehead. (That’s no reason not to listen to his music as you read this; scroll down and click on the link below. Since I’m writing about him these days, I’ve been immensely enjoying some of his 1960s and 1970s albums.)

Improvisation seems to me the most obvious place where Whitehead’s philosophy — a philosophy of processual-relational creativity — is directly applicable to music. Improvised music is about actively and creatively responding to the continual flow of sonic, rhythmic, melodic, and performative processes unfolding around and through oneself and one’s collaborators in the collective creative act.

This is evident only partially in Evan Parker’s no-holds-barred, hours-long soloing — because he’s only improvising with and against himself. (It’s quite a performance, nonetheless.)

And I’m not sure it’s even as clear in the drone-blasting trio playing of Pinhas et al, which has a tendency to fill space in a way that, arguably, “automates” the music to some extent. (In the same way that, say, Metal Machine Music did that.) Pinhas, who’s been called “France’s Robert Fripp,” is still somewhat remarkable for his musical-philosophical symbioses; he studied with Deleuze and taught philosophy at the Sorbonne before becoming a more-or-less full-time musician.

What I’m talking about, however, is much more evident in the spacious angularity of Sun Ra’s compositional-improvisational work with his Arkestra, which may not be as “democratically” improvised as some free improvisation, but nevertheless explores such a variety of textures, timbres, and interactions as to make it a brilliant exposition to process-relational philosophy in sound.

As the process-versus-objects debates of years ago made clear (see the links under “Process-relational theory” here), not all processes are a constant flow, like a firehose blasting until the water runs out. Some are slow, some are uncertain and hesitant, and many intersect with others at varying speeds and different temporal and spatial scales.

Bottom line: perhaps one doesn’t have to read about this stuff in order to get it.