Brewing Dissonance: Conceptualizing Mannerism and Baroque in Music (with Deleuze) (2013)

Brewing Dissonance: Conceptualizing Mannerism and Baroque in Music with Deleuze

Ceciel Meiborg, Sjoerd van Tuinen

Diacritics, Volume 42, Number 3, 2014, pp. 54-82 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University PressDOI:

For additional information about this article

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https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2014.0013

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/582683

https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.2014.0013

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/582683

BREWING DISSONANCECONCEPTUALIZING MANNERISM AND BAROQUE IN MUSIC WITH DELEUZE

CECIEL MEIBORG SJOERD VAN TUINEN

DIACRITICS Volume 42.3 (2014) 54–83 ©2015 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

Ceciel Meiborg holds an MA degree in modern European philosophy from Kingston University. She is working on a PhD proposal on speculative philosophy and technology.Sjoerd van Tuinen is assistant professor of philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is currently finalizing a monograph entitled “Matter, Manner and Idea: Deleuze and Mannerism.”

“These voices,” I said appreciatively, “these voices—they’re a kind of bridge back to the human world.”

And a bridge they remained even while singing the most startlingly chromatic of the mad prince’s compositions. Through the uneven phrases of the madrigals, the music pursues its course, never sticking to the same key for two bars together. . . . The resulting works sounded as though they might have been written by the later Schoenberg.

“And yet,” I felt myself constrained to say, as I listened to these strange products of a Counter-Reformation psychosis working upon a late medieval art form, “and yet it does not matter that he’s all in bits. The whole is disorganized. But each individual fragment is in order, is a representative of a Higher Order. The Highest Order prevails even in the disintegration. The totality is present even in the broken pieces. More clearly present, perhaps, than in a completely coherent work. At least you aren’t lulled into a sense of false security by some merely human, merely fabricated order. . . . But of course it’s dangerous, horribly dangerous. Suppose you couldn’t get back, out of the chaos . . .”

—Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception, 1954

In A Thousand Plateaus Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari warn us that “all of baroque lies brewing beneath classicism.”1 The task of the classical artist, they argue, is “God’s own,” namely “that of organizing chaos” into stable relations of form and content. To compose is to lay out a plane of organization on which binary distinctions compartmen-talize, centralize, and hierarchize relatively simple forms in relation to one another, such that a raw and untamed matter enters into a well-founded order of succession. In music this order is that of, for example, the sonata, suite, serenade, or concerto, forms in which theme and variation are strictly distinguished. But this confrontation with chaos at the same time leads the classical artist to decompose preexisting milieus of coded sound matter, to separate and harmonize them and to regulate their mixtures by passing from one to the other. Beneath the dominance of homophony, lighter texture, pronounced contrast, and variety of the classical period, there still insists and subsists the more complex polyphony, texture, and confusion of the baroque. In Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791), “an ancient wooden flute organizes chaos,” but not without chaos continuing to “reign like the Queen of the Night.” Thus there is a constant communication between classicism and the baroque. Even where noble simplicity and quiet grandeur are the final result, it is always a cacophony of relatively unformed forces and passions that impels the classical will to art: “the artist’s only cry is Creation! Creation! The Tree of Creation!”2 Beside classicism, Deleuze and Guattari also distinguish romanticism and modernism as stylistic ages. Like classicism, they can each be described as assemblages enveloping different relations to an abstract machine of matter-energy. In romanticism, form ceases to be a code subduing chaotic forces and becomes “a force itself, the sum of the forces of the earth.” It becomes “a great form in continuous development,” while matter ceases to be a matter of content and becomes a material possessing its own expressivity, “the mov-ing matter of a continuous variation.”3 Thus in romantic program music such as Gustav Mahler’s The Song of the Earth (1908–9) or the ending of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck (1921)

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musical territories or refrains are founded on the rhythmic “breathing” of the earth. By contrast, when art becomes modern it no longer confronts or mediates chaos through form, but directly opens itself up to its irregular frequencies, timbres, and density. The essential relation resides no longer between form and matter or between territory and earth, but between material and cosmic forces. With Claude Debussy, for example, musical material “becomes capable of harnessing nonsonorous forces such as Dura-tion and Intensity” and with Edgard Varèse, a “sound machine (not a machine for repro-ducing sounds) . . . molecularizes and atomizes, ionizes sound matter, and harnesses a cosmic energy.”4 Given this definition of modernism as an immediate relation with chaos, it is not surprising that Deleuze finds a direct precursor to modernism not in classicism or romanticism, but in the brewing of the baroque.5 Yet what this brewing consists of and how it is a precursor to modern and perhaps even contemporary art we do not learn

from A Thousand Plateaus, but only from The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. There Deleuze claims that “the musical model is the most apt to make clear the rise of harmony in the baroque, and then the dis-sipation of tonality in the neo-baroque: from harmonic closure to an opening onto a polytonality or, as Boulez will say, a ‘polyphony of polyphonies’” (TF, 82). In what follows, our aim is to explore this musical model for defining and distin-

guishing the baroque and neobaroque and simultaneously to propose a way to refine it in terms of a further distinction between mannerist and baroque tendencies. Drawing on the work of various historians and theoreticians of music and the arts no less than philosophy, we argue that many of the so-called baroque traits that Deleuze rediscovers in modern music are mannerist breakthroughs that have sprung from the breakdown of modal polyphony (e.g., the audacity of Carlo Gesualdo’s ultra-chromatic madrigals, which had no immediate successors, or the boldness of early monodies of the Florentine Camerata in which virtually all contrapuntal interest was sacrificed to poetic expres-sivity), whereas what the baroque adds to mannerism is precisely what is suppressed today, after the advent of atonal music and the explosion of common practice into an infinite variety of matter-energy syntheses. But let us begin with why it is pertinent to distinguish mannerism from baroque in the first place.

What the baroque adds to mannerism is precisely what is suppressed today, after the advent of atonal music and the explosion of common practice into an infinite variety of matter-energy syntheses.

Brewing Dissonance >> Ceciel Meiborg and Sjoerd van Tuinen 57

>> Classicism, Mannerism, Baroque: Technical and Aesthetic Planes of Composition

Historically speaking, mannerism and the baroque constitute the long period of crisis between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Whereas the decades around 1500 constituted a period of great hope for harmony and tolerance that were reflected in the humanist ideals of perfection, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought to light the weaknesses of early capitalism, marked by diseases and famines caused by urban overpopulation, the rise of absolutism, and the Inquisition, and of course the 1527 sack of Rome. Alexandre Koyré famously describes the period as a passage from the closed world to the infinite universe. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation added to the spiritual catastrophe. As various historians have argued, the excitement of religious wars of hith-erto unknown cruelty, “the warm breath of mysticism,” and “the eroticism of martyrdom” were brewing in a world formerly devoted to the stable atmosphere of the Renaissance.6 According to many art historians, mannerist and (Catholic) baroque art mirror these material, intellectual, and spiritual crises that brought about the decline of the Renais-sance. Mannerism is considered an anti-classical movement, denying classical virtues such as balance and modesty. In this way it is usually reduced to a mere reactionary phase that would quickly pass into the more mature baroque. Indeed, whereas the man-nerists still represented the elite of their age, upholding the cosmopolitan point of depar-ture of Renaissance humanism, this attitude was soon, during the baroque, to become an anachronism. While the art and music of the mannerists had attained the eminent status of the liberal arts in defiance of the trade guilds, during the baroque they became part of the church’s propaganda apparatus. Mannerism is typically facile, expressive, aloof, complex, contorted, recondite, and artificial, while the baroque returns to a deep, communicative, simple, vigorous, and natural form of art.7 Thus even if it is possible to conceive of mannerism in its “working relation (rapport opératoire) with the baroque” (TF, 36–37), i.e., as the latter’s necessary “paradigm” (38) or “composite” (53) as Deleuze suggests, there are several important distinctions to be made. The Deleuzian concept of mannerism consists of three components: matter, manner, and idea.8 The mannerist breakdown of the classicist plane of representation, on which paint, canvas, marble, etc. are reduced to the undifferentiated content of preestablished molds, first of all marks a breakthrough of new material traits of expression. As can be seen in the deformations of Michelangelo’s sculpted Slaves (1520–23) and their non finito character, the primitive “form” of the materials acquires a decisive influence on the art-ist’s imagination. Of course there is an ongoing codification through illustration and nar-ration, but at the same time all kinds of unformed and previously unknown forces are rendered visible. Similarly, with Tintoretto we see how the introduction of oil paint in the Venetian school liberates the play of light and shadow from the systematic addition of white and black, which in turn is a consequence of the classical valuing of line over color. This leads to an affirmation of a new, more specifically pictorial ligature. Referring to Tintoretto’s Creation of the Animals (ca. 1550), Deleuze and Guattari write:

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What would appear to be another world opens up, an other art, where the lines are deter-ritorialized, the colors are decoded, and now only refer to the relations they entertain among themselves, and with one another. A horizontal or transverse organization of the canvas is born, with lines of escape or breakthrough. . . . A painter such as Tintoretto paints the creation of the world like a race represented in its whole length with God Himself on the sidelines, giving the starting signal across the track as the figures speed away in a transversal direction.9

The emancipation of matter from the regime of representation cannot be separated from the emancipation of manner or style from the essentialism of well-founded forms. It is rather the mutual immanence of matter and manner that leads to an exploration of mate-rials and techniques beyond classical perfection. Mannerism utilizes traditional figura-tive depictions in its quest to incarnate more intense spiritual presences than Renais-sance classicism was capable of. It extracts and isolates from representation the visceral movement of the “figural,” which, according to Deleuze, was “born in its pure state”

with Michelangelo,10 who introduced a “catastrophe” of figuration such that the unity or individuality of composition lies solely in its manner or form of expression. Although formally modeled after Leon-ardo da Vinci’s The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (ca. 1501), the jarring contrap-posto in the serpentine composition of his early Doni Tondo (Holy Family (ca. 1506–8) reveals a much stronger energy and articulates a mere internal unity of form: “it is as if the organisms were caught up in a whirling or serpentine movement that gives them a single ‘body’ or unites them in a single ‘fact,’ apart from any figu-rative or narrative connection.”11 Similarly, while the lower half of El Greco’s The

Burial of the Count de Orgaz (1586) still shows “a figuration or narration that represents the burial of the Count,” the upper half gives us “a wild liberation, a total emancipation: the Figures are lifted up and elongated, refined without measure, outside all constraint.”12

We see how mannerism, without breaking with figuration entirely, constitutes an immanent shift in emphasis from formless matter of content to relatively unformed material of expression and from form of content to informal force or manner of expres-sion. “Matter that reveals its texture becomes raw material, just as form that reveals its folds becomes force” (TF, 35). What makes content and expression communicate is what mannerists called the idea or concetto and what Deleuze refers to as the diagram or abstract machine of art. Up to the High Renaissance, reflection had focused upon the executive stage of the artistic process, resulting in set norms for the work to be carried

The emancipation of matter from the regime of representation cannot be separated from the emancipation of manner or style from the essentialism of well-founded forms. It is rather the mutual immanence of matter and manner that leads to an exploration of materials and techniques beyond classical perfection.


out. Only the sixteenth century witnessed the rise of critical reflection on the concep-tual or ideational stage as well and on the coordination of the two stages. Following the Neoplatonic tradition, mannerists such as Benedetto Varchi or Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo held that the eye judges and the hand executes, but each under its own conditions. It is a common mistake, however, to assume that in mannerism the two stages are discon-nected altogether. This is precisely a classical idea, since in Renaissance art the artificial-ity of the diagrams at work is mostly ignored, if not repressed. Although with manner-ism art begins to demand an intellectual legitimation, the aesthetic ideas could never be separated from their actual application in the material practice from which they arise.13 Or, in Deleuze’s terms, ideas are not possibilities but virtualities. The artist is a vision-ary or seer of ideas, provided that these are “treated like potentials already engaged in one mode of expression or another and inseparable from the mode of expression, such that I cannot say that I have an idea in general.”14 Whereas in classical representation the potential idea slumbering in a given material is first seen by the eye of the intellect and then realized in manual work, mannerism—the Italian maniera derives from mano, hand—sets up a “frenetic zone in which the hand is no longer guided by the eye and is forced upon sight like another will.”15 In sum, if classical representation is based on a “technical plane of composition”16 that projects sensation onto a well-prepared and calm surface of which the material itself seems to include the mathematical rules of deep, linear, perspectival space, then mannerism lays out a properly “aesthetic plane of composition” on which “it is no longer sensation that is realized in the material but the material that passes into sensation.”17 Mannerism is thus most properly understood as a revolution of sensation. It denatural-izes the depth of classical optical space and its figurative clichés by means of a “manual intrusion” that constantly reorients the visual whole: “manipulated chance, as opposed to conceived or seen probabilities.”18 Of course, in reality the technical and aesthetic planes always exist in a mixed form. The expressive is always translated and regulated by pre-existing techniques and codes, while these codes are constantly reversed and transmuted in the act of expression. But the de facto mixtures do not preclude a de jure distinction. The very fact that the two planes do not communicate with each other in the same way proves that there is an effective difference that determines the sense in which their mix-ture appears. This is where Deleuze’s philosophy resonates with established art histori-cal notions of mannerism. For perhaps it is with mannerism, when “the ground rises to the surface”19 and stable relations of form and content collapse, that matter, manner, and idea manifest themselves in the conjunctive immanence of an ahistorical event of pure becoming for the first time in history. Each of the three components of the concept of mannerism returns in Deleuze’s dis-cussion of the baroque. But there, mannerism no longer appears as an independent style, as if it lacked sufficient unity to be considered by itself. As is well known, Deleuze defines the baroque by a single “operative function” or “trait”: the fold continued to infinity. It is only in the baroque that the fold exceeds the replication of the contours of a finite body and becomes itself constitutive of form instead of being a mere attribute of something

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that is folded. The fold is therefore the manual and haptic element that conditions the baroque work of art. As a form of expression, the fold endows the material with the capacity to become expressive by itself and exceed the form in which it is contained. Gian Lorenzo Bernini doesn’t sculpt a body covered with a wrinkled coat, but bends a matter of variable density or texture and distills a body that is lost in a drapery of velour. Moreover, there is an intermedial continuity that turns each medium into the content of another medium. Just as Michelangelo played with the “double function” (Rudolf Witt-kower’s term) of sculpture and architecture in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (1571), Bernini’s churches and palazzi are total works of art in which painting, sculpture, and architecture are successively folded into one another on a shared plane of composition. As in mannerism, the work of art thus refers to an infinite sequence of aberrant manners of folding that are virtually caught up in a wider, abstract movement: “the object here is manneristic, not essentializing: it becomes an event” (TF, 19). But then, how does Deleuze distinguish mannerism from the baroque? The answer lies in his discussion of “the working relation (l’identité opératoire) of the baroque and the fold” (TF, 34). Folding may well be the manner in which the baroque proceeds, but its aim is very different. If mannerism is defined by the inexhaustible heterogeneity of its manners of expression, then the baroque imposes an overall unity or encompass-ing procedure—no matter whether the artist works with veins in marble, differential relations between light and dark in oil paint, or the play of dissonance and consonance in the polyphonic madrigal. For if the crisis of the Renaissance forces the paradigm to become mannerist, the baroque uses this paradigm for the “schizophrenic reconstruc-tion” of a regime of form and representation “on another stage” (TF, 68). According to those art historians who approach mannerism from an anti-classicist point of view, there is a strong heretic tendency in mannerism that is on a par with the baroque attempt to reimpose a sense of transcendence. If the paradigm is mannerist, then “the extreme specificity of the baroque” (TF, 34), Deleuze argues, must be the “formal deduction of the fold” (38) from the theatrum naturae et artis, i.e., the world as it is composed by God in preestablished harmony. Indeed, baroque folding is inseparable from a Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk that guarantees the unity of a whole and without which its interstitial and intermedial folds would be kept hanging in suspense.20 The fold is thus paradig-matic for the ex cathedra submission of the Counter-Reformation to the uncertainties and flexibilities of the mannerist world. It is indeed the operative unity of the baroque, but the baroque remains merely parasitical on mannerism’s will to art. Instead of mate-rial contingencies, the baroque seeks material reassurances by theologically sanctioning the veneration of images and the piety of the body. Folding is less an aesthetic manner or style than the technical method or paradigm by which the baroque solves local ten-sions and reinstalls a meaningful totality. “In this supplementary dimension of folding, unity continues its spiritual labor,” because of which even the most fragmented can be presented as a totality.21 Thus although the baroque pushes the anti-classical and revolu-tionary “catastrophe” of mannerism to its extremes, it simultaneously forms a conserva-tive and restorative reaction to it. Even if the baroque approximates chaos and thrives on excess, it does so in order to retotalize the chaotic forces.22


>> Mannerism in Music: A Fusion of Theory and Practice

Of course, we cannot simply transpose the changes in the plastic arts to the context of music. If painting, for example, is a struggle with the persistent face-landscape machine that forms its necessary content and identity, music is the “labor of the refrain.”23 In itself, the refrain (e.g., birdsong) is not a musical becoming, but a natural being or force of repetition that encodes milieus and organizes territorial assemblages. Music can only come into being through a direct imitation of the material repetitions given in nature. Yet it is simultaneously through its disparate manner of repetition that “imitation self-destructs” and the voice or the refrain is made “a deterritorialized content for a deter-ritorializing form of expression.”24 In fact, Deleuze and Guattari argue that music is the most expressive of the arts. The voice, which has been at the core of musical practice for eras, possesses the greatest power of deterritorialization because as soon as it becomes less tied to language it has the most intense and the most collective force of all the human organs. At the same time, however, this power of the voice for collective fascination is also its intrinsic problem. For as Plato already knew, it makes music a highly effective means for propaganda: “music (drums, trumpets) draws people and armies into a race that can go all the way to the abyss (much more so than banners and flags, which are paintings, means of classification and rallying).”25 But then, couldn’t we still conceive of this danger of musical “fascism” as analogous to the way in which, in the course of the Counter-Reformation, mannerist inventions were gradually incorporated into the baroque socius? In music, the term maniera appears for the first time in fifteenth-century dance man-uals. As in later treatises on the visual arts, it derives directly from the etiquette of high-class civility. Initially it referred less to an entirely new style than to a deterritorialization of underlying refrains of the Renaissance. Even the extreme chromatic compositions of Gesualdo have their origins in traditional polyphony. Many historians therefore regard mannerism as a transitional stage between the equal-voice polyphony of the late Renais-sance, the so-called ars perfecta, which commences with the Franco-Flemish composer Guillaume Dufay (ca. 1397–474) and the exuberant plurality of styles of the baroque. Polyphony was initially based on Boethius’s Arithmetic (sixth century, and one of the first books to be printed in Venice between 1491–92), in which music is defined as the Pythagorean science of numbers, proportions, and natural perfection.26 At the outset of the sixteenth century, harmony, melody, and rhythm reached their artistic grandeur in the contrapuntal procedures of Josquin des Prez. He set the standard for subsequent stylization in compositions such as Absalon, fili mi (1497), which already reveals the mannerist ambiguity between the strongly personalized sentiments (textually couched in first person singular) and the depersonalized medium of polyphony (embodying first person plural). The polyphonic music of Philippe Verdelot, Costanzo Festa, and Jacques Arcadelt shows further tendencies toward affective refinement, artificiality, and orna-mentation through “harmonic coloring, rhythmic contrasts, pauses, and sighing fig-ures.”27 Moderate mannerist Nicola Vicentino no longer strictly separates composition (technical modo) and stylistic considerations (the aesthetic maniera) as in Renaissance

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composition, but fuses them together: “notions about musical expressivity are no longer appended as afterthoughts to the science of counterpoint. On the contrary, they arise naturally from considerations of compositional principles predicated on style.”28 Despite important transformations in music theory, Claudio Monteverdi’s later celebrated dis-tinction between the prima prattica and the seconda prattica similarly emphasizes the fact that music theoretical concepts cannot be separated from actual differences in practice.29

The fusion of theory and practice already enabled composers before Monteverdi such as Cipriano de Rore, Giaches de Wert, and Orlando di Lasso to give precedence to the expression of extreme passions and spiritual depth over mathematical techniques, as can be heard in, e.g., the harmonic coloring in de Wert’s Non è sì denso velo (1586). If the ars perfecta is the representation of the mathematical unity and perfection embodied in nature (the sounding number), then these early “radical” mannerists created sounds that depart from numerical ratios and that are not necessarily pleasing to the ear. It is true that many of these spiritual tendencies can already be recognized in gothic reli-gious music, with the difference that expressive tensions in mannerism are no longer brought back to harmonic unison. Moreover, with the shift of music from the scientific quad rivium to the rhetorical trivium, theorized by Gioseffo Zarlino and Adrianus Petit Coclico as a shift from musici mathematici like Dufay to musici poetici such as Josquin and Heinrich Isaac, the Pythagorean imitation of the balanced perfection of nature is replaced by the Aristotelian imitation of the passions expressed in poetry (the so-called imitazione del soggetto della parole).30 Mannerists no longer need a mathematical justifi-cation for their artificiality, but only an aesthetic one. It is exactly the tension between, on the one hand, the highly rational principles that guide the compositional practice and create an artificial style, and, on the other hand, the highly expressive devices that are at the core of mannerist musica poetica instead of arte sive scientia contrapuncti.31

When it comes to composition this implies that Renaissance modal harmony starts to show its first cracks. In modal harmony intervals should never create unprepared dis-sonance or introduce dissonance on the strong beat, because the mode presented is only unified in the melodic line. In the contrapuntal style every note has one or several coun-terpoints that balance the melody produced. This way, no extremities arise and disso-nance is controlled. Yet, whereas most classical theorists rule out dissonance in principle even if in practice it seems unavoidable, Zarlino in Istitutioni harmoniche (1558) is the first to argue that technical procedures and refined style are in fact inseparable.32 He is thus able to make the claim that certain dissonances—the major and minor sixths, as well as the major and minor thirds—are needed “for greater beauty and charm,”33 this way clearing the grounds for mannerist and baroque usage of dissonance. Because modes are threatened with disintegration when dissonance is brought in without preparation, he still proclaims the deployment of intervals only within the confines of the given modes. Things change with the Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna (1581–82) of his pupil Vincenzo Galilei, who substitutes poetic expressivity for consonance as the final aim of the composition and thus allows for the aesthetic use of intervals freed from


technical considerations.34 In reality, Galilei argues, there are no such things as “sono-rous numbers,” for “the inequalities that produce a consonance in one material [e.g., a string] may well be at odds with those that produce it in another [e.g., a bell].”35 “The mathematical ratios of harmony now appeared as no more than the signs of different types of beings, signs whose meaning, therefore, depended on material.”36 Of course, it is precisely because the modern physical universe, unlike the ancient cosmos with its harmony of spheres, is not in itself mathematical, that it could be measured to an unprecedented extent. What is not mathematical in itself, can be “mathema-ticized” in a new conjunction of harmony and mathematics.37 This happens in the science of “acoustics” from Giovanni Bat-tista Benedetti to Galileo Galilei (the son of Vincenzo) to the Leibnizian theory of minute perceptions, which correlates sounds not with the lengths of strings but with their vibrations—thus accounting mathematically for both commensurable and incom-mensurable ratios or temperaments and creating a new kind of compromise between aesthetics and mathematics. But whereas baroque music would introduce a new kind of harmonization, in mannerism the chromatic excursions, repeated chords, polyphoni-cally animated homophony, and syllabic text treatment still have a sort of aesthetic and spiritual autonomy. Both Renaissance and mannerist harmony differ from baroque har-mony in that they are conceived of in terms of intervals, instead of chords.38 But manner-ism already introduces an unheard-of liberation of melody that lacks the tonal direction of the baroque chords. Even though Pythagorean proportions are still used, they find their justification only in relation to compositional or performance methods. The latter quickly gain in complexity and subtlety and produce startling effects (effetti meravigli-osi) beyond the classical precepts of perfection.

>> Voice and Text: A-Parallel Becomings of the Madrigal

Yet how are we to evaluate this shift from mathematical rules to poetic expressivity? Does mannerist music deterritorialize the voice from mathematics only to reterritorial-ize it again in language? On the contrary, vocal music, precisely because it is content to refer to the text, does not need anything outside itself to become expressive. After all, nothing is more affective and closer to the passions than the voice itself. But neither is this to say that the voice, when regarded independently of language, is to be conceived of as the most natural expression of the passions. Rather, in music the voice is already relatively deterritorialized: not only from language, but even more so from the organism and the organic passions. As we can argue with Deleuze and Guattari, when virtuos-ity and ornamentation become the norm it is not so much the natural character of the voice, but rather its machinic artificiality that is pursued.39 Whether it is the head voice

In music the voice is already relatively deterritorialized: not only from language, but even more so from the organism and the organic passions.

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of the countertenor or the stomach voice of the castrati, for example, what happens is a decoding of the voice as masculine or feminine, adult or child, in a universal “becoming-woman” or “becoming-child”:

The voice itself must attain a becoming-woman or a becoming-child. That is the prodigious content of music. It is no longer a question . . . of imitating a woman or a child, even if it is a child who is singing. The musical voice itself becomes-child at the same time as the child becomes-sonorous, purely sonorous. No child could ever have done that, or if one did, it would be by becoming in addition something other than a child, a child belonging to a dif-ferent, strangely sensual and celestial, world.40

In the course of the sixteenth century, the deterritorializing movement of the voice quickly accelerated with the invention of the polyphonic madrigal in Venice, the genre of nonchoral vocal music for two or more singers each of whom has a separate part. Unlike Rome, which was dominated by the clergy, Venice was strongly influenced by an international-minded trading elite. Besides ecclesiastic music such as the motet, the madrigal is thus also influenced by the multifarious styles and genres of secular music, such as the Italian frottola or villanella, or the French chanson.41 Due to its eclecticism it became the primary platform for the rise of a secular spirituality in music, entering new realms outside the religious sphere with the rise of theater music and chamber music. Most importantly, music became intimately connected with the new literary genres of concetti and pastorali (Guarini, Marino, Ariosto, Tasso, the movement of bembismo). Monteverdi even regarded domination of text over music as the fundamental distinc-tion between the first and second practice.42 As the musical theme—the soggetto della compositione—becomes poetical, there is an increasing emphasis on improvisation and embellishment by solo singers. The composition and its performance are no longer bal-anced, humble, and distant, but extreme and passionate. New compositions demand an extraordinary virtuosity in the actual interpretation (initially a cappella) and find their fleeting consistency only in the self-conscious stylization of the performer.43 Besides a novel sweetness and spicy refinement, extremities appear such as very high and low voices or rhythmic variety (Cipriano de Rore’s Hor che’l ciel e la terra, 1542). Often, the words of a text are subdivided so that phrases are incomplete in any one voice and only make sense in polyphony (Francesco Corteccia’s laceramento della poesia). In the poly-choral style, Giovanni Gabrieli introduced “broken” choirs or cori spezzati (e.g., O Mag-num mysterium, 1597) in which parts of one group are contrasted with the full sound of a whole choir, and the sequence of contrasting sound—high and low, loud and soft—builds up ever-larger volumes until the climax is reached in the union of them all. With the bold counterpoint and pervading chromaticism of Luca Marenzio’s intellectual play with crude progressions in Udite, lagrimosi spirti (1594) and Gesualdo’s Languisce al fin (book 5, 1611) or Moro, lasso (book 6, 1611), the madrigal reaches its most exaggerated peak and becomes a free sequence of impressions, “pictures,” and musical outbursts.44

Within the madrigalist tradition, the relation between text and music lies at the core of the late sixteenth-century conflict between contrapuntal writing and monody. Although


many of the early polyphone madrigal composers still used linear counterpoint in their musical pieces, contrapuntal style becomes one of the foremost targets of “avant-gardist” musicians and composers, especially the members of the Florentine Camerata such as Jacopo Peri or Vincenzo Galilei. Since text had to be leading in any composition and music should serve as a reinforcement of the expressive power of words, the monodic style (arias, i.e., strophic or stanzaic songs) was most suitable.45 In a monodic composi-tion there is only one melody, now freed from the conditions of counterpoint. Similarly, the strophic variation of Orpheus’s song in the third act of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo (1607), “Possente spirto,” exemplifies how this liberation of melody also implies that rhythm or senza battuta (without measure) becomes more important than meter or Renais-sance tactus (derived from the organic heartbeat—evenly flowing beats). While meter or cadence is “dogmatic,” as it presupposes a coded form that is forced upon sounding matter, rhythm is “critical” and articulates an immanent continuity or material memory of “non-pulsed time”46 between heterogeneous and potentially incommensurable blocks or milieus.47

On the one hand, it is thus true that, beginning as hedonistic court entertainment, the social function of the madrigal is to represent or depict the dramatic content of Petrar-chist and concettist verse. Aristotelian enargeia, the impassioned use of rhetorical fig-ures, is at the basis not only of poetic ornamentation, but also of musical eloquence in the mimesis of the passions. We see this transposition in the use of contrapposti ver-bali in poetry that is put onto music at the same time that the use of contrapuntal com-posing declines. In so-called aural figures, musical shapes are “based on rhythm and motion: running melismas, sighing contours, unexpected stops, jagged intervals, and rising and falling melodies.”48 Often, the expressive character of the words (most often amorous sentimentality) is also emphasized through “eye-music” (purely visual depic-tions through notation, e.g., Monteverdi’s Non si levava ancor [1590], which transposes the poetic analogy of “embracing of the lovers to the convoluted shape of the acanthus plant” to “interweaving melodic figures whose visual outline reproduces the acanthus leaf and whose aural sound depicts the ardor of their embrace”49), note nere (the repre-sentation of lament, night, or death in black notes, e.g., Francesco Corteccia’s Quest’io tesseva [1544]) and “word-painting” (audible patterns of line or rhythm that are fixed with words, such as quickly augmenting scales to express gioia [ joy]). In Monteverdi’s Zefiro torna, based on the work of the poet Tasso, the word l’onde is expressed by a rip-pling melody, whereas da monti a da valli ime e profondi is rendered by sharply rising and falling lines. Thus Maria Rika Maniates is not wrong to argue that, historically speaking, the madrigal style must be understood as imitative-affective.50 It was certainly for this reason, too, that the rhetorical power of monody, as stile rappresentativo, was particu-larly appealing to the Jesuits and to be fully exploited for social and religious purposes in the baroque. Yet on the other hand, this representational understanding of the voice allows only for technical differences between the old, imitative-natural madrigal of the fourteenth century (a strophic song with a ritornello as fixed, repetitive form) and the moderna

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novità of the sixteenth century. From the point of view of its own expressivity, however, the mannerist voice consists not just of a deterritorialization of the refrain as the natural material of music, but even of music and poetry as such.51 As such it no longer imitates anything outside of itself and produces a resemblance only through what Deleuze calls “non-resembling means.”52 If, as Maniates argues, lyric tends toward “musicalization” while music tends toward “literalization,”53 this implies that music, as a becoming-text of the voice, is inseparable from a becoming-other of the text itself—in other words, what Deleuze and Guattari call an a-parallel evolution or transversal line of flight.54 Contrary to what Maniates argues, namely that “music’s expressive capability rests entirely on the objective imitation of conceits [i.e., poetic concetti] and the objective representation of the affections,”55 the voice also becomes affective by itself. Just as it is possible to push language to the limit that separates it from music by insertions that engender other insertions in an endless mannerism of indirection,56 the voice can be operated such that it proliferates “from the middle” (par le milieu) and that it is pushed to the limit that separates it from language. Perhaps it is precisely this excessive and principally infinite refinement, this singular “folding” of the voice over itself in infinite and continuous vari-ation, that creates a novel and startling kind of perfection. We could also define this perfection in the new mannerist relation of music to text as actively affecting instead of reactive or affected. As Deleuze says of Carmelo Bene’s Man-fred (1978), a theater piece based on Lord Byron’s poem and Robert Schumann’s music, rather than characters that speak, it is the voice itself that becomes the protagonist:

Voices no longer whisper, yell or bellow depending on the emotion to express, but whis-pering becomes a voice, cries become a voice. At the same time, the corresponding emo-tions (affects) become vocal modes. And all of these voices and modes communicate from inside. . . . The question is not only to extract sound from vision, but also to extract all the musical power from the spoken voice.57

Poetic affects, in other words, now become themselves the unformed forces that can only be harnessed in sound, even to such an extent that music becomes the mannerist art par excellence.

>> Mannerist Chromaticism and Baroque Tonality

The most daring experiments undertaken by mannerist music take place in interval-lic progressions and chromaticism blended with the diatonic scale as compositional device. By permeating classical modes with extra semitones an ominous effect is cre-ated, because these added semitone intervals can, at most, only partly be reconciled with the mode presented. The latter collapses when its texture is stretched too much by dissonance. Chromatic experimentation reaches its apex in the mid-sixteenth cen-tury and quickly becomes a regular device of the mannerist repertory.58 While Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, the composer of the Counter-Reformation, almost dogmatically avoided all chromaticism, the madrigals of Marenzio, Gesualdo, or Claudio Saracini, are


pervaded by chromaticism. What is crucial, however, is that this always happens in a tempered form, which means that incommensurable intervals are played impurely, thereby diminishing both the purity of modal concord and the perceptibility of discord. In terms of Deleuze and Guattari, chromaticism always begins in the middle. Chro-maticism wrenches itself free from within the unity of the mode and leaps for what lies outside it. But this immanent deviation also immediately turns against what keeps the mode from disintegrating. Chromaticism thus introduces an “ambiguity: stretching the action of the center to the most distant tones, but also preparing the disaggregation of the central principle, replacing the centered forms of continuous development with a form that constantly dissolves and transforms itself.”59 The stretching of modal unity thus reveals its texture while simultaneously rupture becomes a serious threat. Yet it is precisely this threat of a “generalized chromaticism” that marks the profound modernity of mannerism. For as Deleuze and Guattari argue,

when chromaticism is unleashed, becomes a generalized chromaticism, turns back against temperament, affecting not only pitches but all sound components—durations, intensities, timbre, attacks—it becomes impossible to speak of a sound form organizing matter; it is no longer even possible to speak of a continuous development of form. Rather, it is a question of a highly complex and elaborate material making audible nonsonorous forces. The couple matter-form is replaced by the coupling material-forces.60

In baroque music, by contrast, the threat of a generalized chromaticism is averted through the reduction of the plurality of modes to the two modes of the tonal system: the major and minor scales. The tonal system is much more stable than the modal system, because harmony is conceived of in chords and no longer in the intervals that constitute melody. As Deleuze and Guattari state: “In the tonal or diatonic system of music, laws of resonance and attraction determine centers valid for all modes and endowed with stability and attractive power (pouvoir). . . . It is true that the minor ‘mode’ gives tonal music a decentered, runaway, fugitive character . . . as though music set out on a journey and garnered all resurgences, phantoms of the Orient, imaginary lands, traditions from all over.”61 Yet the minor mode will always be realigned to the major model or standard. Melody is free to wander far beyond the limits of Renaissance music only because har-mony is now guaranteed outside melody. Thus while the unity of resonance between melodic lines in counterpoint opens the space for mannerist dissonance and chromat-icism, the baroque invents a new expressivity based not on intervals but on series of chords or melodic inflexion. Interestingly, however, it is the late mannerist invention of basso continuo—also known as thorough or numerical bass—that enables the baroque to make this transition from modal harmony to tonal harmony. Whereas in the Renaissance the different parts or voices are customarily of equal importance, the new style emphasizes melody and bass, the latter acting as a foundation for additional melodic and harmonic material.62

Thus for the use of continuous bass at least two voices are needed in any performance: one playing the bass line with numbers of the chords and a melody instrument or human

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voice. Although it is used as a simple and efficient means of accompaniment, continuous bass is nonetheless a sign of the fundamental change in texture and harmonic expres-sion. Throughout the entire composition this bass represents the middle voices in a choir, which used to be at the core of the Renaissance polyphonic composition, such that now the outer voices acquire a new freedom. Thus while Renaissance polyphony made use of basso seguente, a bass that follows melody generally by doubling the lowest voice, mannerist and baroque numerical bass releases melody rather than following it: it “does not impose a harmonic law upon the lines of polyphony without having the melody retrieve a new freedom and unity, or a flux” (TF, 135). Zefiro torna, for example, is built upon a concise bass motif of two measures (basso ostinato). Monotony is nonetheless avoided by means of the expressive subtlety with which contrasting affects are portrayed in the duet of two tenors. Or as Giulio Caccini puts it in the preface to Le nuove musiche (1602), a collection of strophic songs with basso continuo together with madrigals: “A certain noble negligence of song, sometimes passing through several dissonances while still maintaining the bass note (save when I wished to do it the ordinary way and play the inner parts on the instrument to express some effect).”63

From Monteverdi’s fifth book of madrigals onward, continuous bass becomes an important device of early baroque music, which would derive tonal unity from it. But this way it simultaneously makes itself redundant, as it paves the way for tonal harmony

by creating a stable center from which melody could depart. Already Heinrich Schütz and Marco Scacchi make use of continuous bass in the service of a new style of tonal counterpoint, which would be defined theoretically in the eighteenth century as functional harmony.64 Har-mony is “functional” when it distributes the function of each tone of the diatonic scale in relation to the keynote. It arises through the central role of the interval between the fifth and the first tone of the musical scale, i.e., the sol and the do. The composition always returns through the sol to the key of the composition (the do),

this way resolving the tension that is accumulated through the introduction of disso-nances. This tension relief makes the music of the baroque far more accessible and com-forting to the tonally disciplined ear than mannerist music. Speaking with Deleuze, it subordinates expressivity to functionality again. Mannerism is thus a transitory stage, in which there is not yet the safety of a tonal center and no longer the balance of intervallic proportionality. There remains an immanent connection with modal music, but only in a highly deterritorialized manner. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, tonality or modality do not mean much, nor does

Mannerism is thus a transitory stage, in which there is not yet the safety of a tonal center and no longer the balance of intervallic proportionality. There remains an immanent connection with modal music, but only in a highly deterritorialized manner.


breaking away from them, as long as they refer to an established organization or form. More important is what happens within these established structures. It is here that man-nerism has already become the brewing dissonance that would reappear in the transi-tion from romanticist to modernist music:

The ferment in the tonal system itself (during much of the nineteenth and twentieth cen-turies) that dissolved temperament and widened chromaticism while preserving a relative tonality, which reinvented new modalities, brought a new amalgamation of major and minor, and in each instance conquered realms of continuous variation for this variable or that. This ferment came to the forefront and made itself heard in its own right; and, through the molec-ular material thus wrought, it made audible the nonsonorous forces of the cosmos that have always agitated music—a bit of Time in the pure state, a grain of absolute Intensity.65

What is at stake in mannerism no less than in later romanticism, then, is not so much the negation of old structures, but rather their immanent metamorphosis, their infinite and continuous variation. Through an abundance of chromaticism, the experimental madri-gals of Gesualdo create a new kind of relative modality in which the modes as such are no longer clearly distinguishable and embark on a collective line of flight. Still, Gesualdo is not so much countering modal music as he is pushing the new musical doctrines of Zarlino and Vicentino to their limits, thus maximizing their expressive potential even beyond Marenzio or Monteverdi. The boldness and ingenuity of his modulations are less the negation of modal music than their extreme affirmation and deterritorialization. It will only be up to the baroque to reterritorialize them.

>> Mannerist Intermezzi and Baroque Opera

Mannerist expressivity becomes subordinate to functional harmony precisely at the moment when baroque music aims to infiltrate every fiber of public life and replaces mannerist intellectualism and exclusivity with a grandeur, spectacle, and theatricality that appeal to the entire population. It is true that before the influence of the Coun-ter-Reformation, and also partly under its exalting constraints, mannerism had already inspired religious music with luxuriant polyphonic masses and motets. Gabrieli’s vast tonal murals, based on the tossing back and forth of contrasting, unequal sound masses (the Venetian echo effect, e.g., the motet In ecclesiis [1597]), became the prec-edent for the later “colossal baroque” and the concertato or concerting style (concer-tare means to compete) based on chordal harmony between cori spezzati. In response to the luxuriance, virtuosity, stylistic varieties and artifice of the maniera madrigalesca, however, the Jesuits in Rome sought to reestablish the relation between form and con-tent, emphasized by voluminous tones and majestic voices, in order to employ the great appeal of rhetorical music for Catholic purposes. This is reflected by the gradual shift from the chromatic and dramatic madrigal (Gesualdo, Marenzio) to the recitative mon-ody (Cavalieri, Caccini, Saracini), the cantata (Carissimi), and ultimately, opera (Peri, Monteverdi, Schütz, Scacchi). For this reason, it has often been argued that music, together

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with the other arts of the baroque, solved the “crisis of representation” by aspiring to the condition of theater.66 Here as elsewhere, there is an increasing tendency of overlapping and integration of artistic disciplines that would ultimately lead to the baroque ideal of the total work of art. When it comes to the development of opera there cannot be designated one single pre-cursor. The early Italian operas can roughly be divided into three groups: the Florentine recitative opera, the Roman chorus opera, and the Venetian solo opera. It is already with Florentine opera (such as Peri’s La Dafne, ca. 1597), inspired by the dramatic extremities of the early monodic recitative, that the baroque totalizing tendency can be discerned in unifying drama, theater, and music. The move of the opera to Rome implied a transition to a more conservative performance, for example by the introduction of a cappella mad-rigals on stage.67 Opera composers merely acquired what they needed from the madrigal, the cantata, the villanella, and other popular song forms, the sonata and the concerto, changing only gradually between 1640 and 1770. Even if opera is a properly baroque invention, its integration of music and theater has an interesting precursor in the mannerist intermezzi or intermedii: singing, dancing, and instrumental pieces performed with elaborate stage machinery and lavish costumes, described in so-called festival books. Although initially modest musical scenes as part of larger spoken festival plays, Florentine intermezzi such as Antonio Landi’s Il com-modo (1539) or Francesco D’Armbra La cofanaria (1565) quickly became their central attraction with the introduction of mascherata, machine-effects of scent, the staging of entire sea battles, and an overwhelming concentration of talent. Many important artistic figures of various disciplines such as Giovan Battista Cini, Giorgio Vasari, Federico Zuc-caro, Bernardo Buontalenti, Alessandro Striggio, and Francesco Corteccia cooperated in the latter. Intermedii differ from opera, however, in the sense that music and drama are still distinct art forms, rather than blending them into baroque dramma per musica.68 Music, either for singing or dancing, played only an intermittent or episodic part in an otherwise spoken entertainment. John Shearman even holds the intermezzo as the most encompassing manifestation of mannerism, precisely because it sacrifices the unity of the whole and stresses the “jewel-like effects” to be found in the multiplicity of parts.69 It is in a similar sense that Deleuze and Guattari take “relays, intermezzos, resurgences” as paradigmatic for the rhizome:70

A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. . . . The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speeds in the middle.71

As we have seen, the ambition of the baroque, however, surpasses that of mannerism. If in mannerism, music drags all the other arts along as intermezzo—i.e., immanently—such that there is no subsumption, and intermediate parts resonate by jumping from one rela-


tion of speed and slowness to another while retaining their independency, the baroque imposes the transcending order of theater upon them and thus slows their interactions down in the heavy masses of an “infinite” or “orgiastic representation.”72 In visual art this tension relief can be found first of all in Bernini’s ideal of bel composto, the harmoni-ous unity of various media: the world becomes organized over “extrema that define the stability of the figures, figures that organize masses, masses that follow an extrinsic vec-tor of gravity or of the greatest incline” (TF, 102). In The Fold, however, Deleuze prefers to discuss the gesamt-character of the baroque in terms of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s demand that God composed the world in pre-established harmony of its parts (monads). In The Logic of Sense, he had already exclaimed about Leibniz’s conception of the cre-ation of the world: “What a bad move is there in Leibniz’s economic combination! This is not at all the world as a work of art.”73 Things have changed in The Fold, where Deleuze exclaims: “How much Leibniz is part of this world, for which he provides the philosophy it lacks!” (TF, 126). Leibniz’s philosophy is presented as nothing less than the transcrip-tion of an entire “opera” of affects, percepts, and concepts.74 All possible materials are mobilized in order to proof how Leibniz’s concept of the fold is being deduced from the “universal theater that includes air and earth, and even fire and water” (TF, 123)—an intricately interlocked Gesamtkunstwerk of painting, sculpture, architecture, urban design, literature, philosophy, and music. This total “theater of matter” (TF, 34) ulti-mately encompasses the whole breadth and extensity of the physical world, “a broad and floating world . . . a scene or an immense plateau” (124), held together by an immense “partition” drawing the spectator, but ultimately also the philosopher, into a general “performance” (123). And yet the core of the rhapsodic argument in the last chapter of The Fold entitled “The New Harmony” is that, even if the baroque finds its unity in theater, Leibniz him-self derived his philosophy primarily from music. In one of Deleuze’s many chiastic for-mulations, we go “not from monads to harmony, but from harmony to monads. Harmony is monadological, but because monads are initially harmonic” (TF, 129). The Leibnizian world must be conceived as the infinite variation of an infinity of contrapuntal themes. But even if the number of melodic lines is infinite, the baroque will always be able to extract harmony from it, folding them all the way from the world of physical forces into the metaphysical domain of souls: “a harmonious solution is always found in the end.”75 The world is a musical “house,” as Deleuze calls it with Karlheinz Stockhausen,76 com-posed of an “immense melody and flow” of force-matter (TF, 135) on the lower floor and harmony on the upper floor, a “concertation” of matter functioning like an “ideal causality” (133–34), a musical ordering of foldings through counterpoint in accords from the material depths of raw matter all the way into the metaphysical domain of essential forms or eternal “souls” (136) that extract from the physical world a “higher unity to which the other arts are moving as so many melodic lines” (127–28). Hence the definition of the baroque is ultimately “harmonic polyphony or counterpoint in accords” (TF, 136):

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At its limit the material universe accedes to a unity in horizontal and collective extension, where melodies of development themselves enter into relations of counterpoint, each spill-ing over its frame and becoming the motif of another such that all of Nature becomes an immense melody and flow of bodies. And this collective unity in extension does not con-tradict the other unity, the subjective, conceptual, spiritual, harmonic, and distributive unity. (TF, 135)

Even if, when compared to the laws of harmony in pre-baroque modal music and post-baroque classical music, melodies are relatively free in their development, the baroque thus marks a return to the Pythagorean tradition. It reaches its apex with Johann Sebas-tian Bach, who firmly reestablished contrapuntal polyphony, albeit tonal and no lon-ger modal. The organizational potential of tonal schemes allows for a new contrapuntal complexity in which two or more distinct movements displaying contrasting melodic lines and rhythms can nevertheless form a coherent interdependent group structure. It allows for the new freedom of melodies to spin off, i.e., Fortspinnungsmelodik: an infinite melody in continuous variation and entangled in a potential infinity of other melodies. While the material world is full of incommensurable heterogeneities (disso-nances), it demands that these can always be harmonized, in one manner or another. Harmony is not a structure that is imposed on melody, but something effectuated in the infinitely modulating lines of melody. With the mannerist crisis as its productive motor, the baroque discovers that the only harmony that remains—an always temporary, inter-mediate, improvised harmony—lies in expressive modulation itself. “Here perhaps we have the secret of modulation: the way it traces a broken line in perpetual bifurcation, a rhythmic line, like a new dimension capable of engendering harmony and melody.”77

>> Conclusion: Mannerism and Modernism

We now see how baroque opera lies brewing beneath classicism and already antici-pates the modern age of musical creation in which everything is in movement and each movement constantly relaunches all the others, such that the plane of composition is ceaselessly being woven as a great “machinic opera,”78 an “immense mechanosphere, plane of cosmicization of the forces to be harnessed.”79 This, according to Deleuze, is the basic idea of modern art as a whole: the creation of excessive diagonal folds that break with any transcendent harmonic or melodic order and become complicated in the great Refrain of their common and immanent becoming: “perplication.”80 From here it is only a small step to what he calls a contemporary “neo-baroque,” in which dissonance must no longer be dissolved in a tonal system. Today, he writes:

A vertical harmony can no longer be distinguished from a horizontal harmonic, just like the private condition of a dominant monad that produces its own accords in itself, and the public condition of monads in a crowd that follow lines of melody. The two begin to fuse on a sort of diagonal. . . . The question always entails living in the world, but Stockhausen’s musical habi-tat or Dubuffet’s plastic habitat do not allow the differences of inside and outside, of public


and private, to survive. They identify variation and trajectory, and overtake monadology with a “nomadology.” Music has stayed at home; what has changed now is the organization of the home and its nature. We are all still Leibnizian, although accords no longer convey our world or our text.81

Even if with the neo-baroque “the conditions of the problem itself have changed” (TF, 136), Deleuze claims that all creativity in music, all becoming-other of music, derives from a diagonal or transversal connection between conventional musical components. All great composers, he argues with Pierre Boulez, are forced to invent “a kind of diago-nal running between the harmonic vertical and the melodic horizon,”82 such that “the same expressive problem will animate music endlessly, from Wagner to Debussy and now up to Cage, Boulez, Stockhausen, and Berio” (TF, 136). And yet, isn’t this prob-lem behind changing problems precisely the abstract problem or metaschematism that already surfaced with mannerism, in other words, even before the baroque? Just as the expressionism of sixteenth-century mannerism, the mannerism of mod-ernism is the result of a catastrophe. In music the new expressivity that surfaces from a fragmented world becomes especially clear:

Some contemporary musicians have pushed to the limit the practical idea of an immanent plane which no longer has a hidden principle of organization, but where the process must be heard no less than what comes out of it; where forms are only retained to set free variations of speed between particles or molecules of sound; where themes, motifs and subjects are only retained to set free floating affects.83

Music is perhaps the only form of art that contains no inertia, but only speeds and slow-nesses on the plane of composition. As Deleuze says, it contains an “absolute speed,” the speed of immanence, where everything is perceived at the same time, such that even slowness or immobile points are immanent to the musical lines, instead of vice versa (e.g., Olivier Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités, 1949).

It is not possible to produce a point in music. It’s nothing but becomings without future or past. Music is an anti-memory. It is full of becomings: animal-becoming, child-becoming, molecular-becoming. Steve Reich wants everything to be perceived in act in music, wants the process to be completely understood: therefore this music is the slowest, but because it makes us perceive all the differential speeds.84

In other words, with music we always begin in the middle, on the diagonal line of flight between horizontal and vertical stratification.85 But only modernist “music” has been capable of freeing the diagonal line entirely from the organic play of identity and varia-tion, memory and becoming. Here there is only milieu, only intermezzo, only becoming. When all theatrical representation is abolished, what remains for music is a resonance that leaves nothing unmoved. With modernism, the fundamental restlessness consti-tuting music stays at the surface and reveals its texture, thus announcing its schizo-phrenic disintegration.

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Although certain mannerist tendencies are to be recognized in modernism, we are not saying that modernism equals mannerism. Even if it stretches the old modal structure in abrupt and unexpected intervals and introduces non-tonal parameters such as sound and dynamic (e.g., pianississimo or crescendo) to such an extent that its rupture becomes inevitable, mannerism still implies and refers to the central perspective of the norm of the preceding musical era. While such reference can still be found in the early work (op. 10–17) of Arnold Schoenberg—in The Book of the Hanging Gardens (op. 15, 1907–9), for example, abrupt intervals and extreme changes in dynamic still suggest a tonal center although they also emphatically deviate from it—modernism no longer recognizes such a center at all. Mannerist music is by no means a general chromaticism and therefore cannot be put in one line with musical pieces of the later Schoenberg, John Cage, or Varèse. This is also reflected by Deleuze’s repeated opposition between, for example, the “punctual system” of numerical bass and the “multilinear system” of what we may call the “numbering number” or “non-pulsed time” of endlessly variable durational blocks in Boulez.86

Nonetheless, modernism shares more tendencies with mannerism than with the baroque. This is because both mannerism and modernism are defined less by the estab-lished procedures that guarantee their overall unity than by their capacity of immanent deviation from them. Just as mannerism is not defined by modal polyphony, modern-

ism is defined not by atonality but rather by the fact that “music becomes modern relative to the conditions, perceptions and conventions of its time—modernism is not, in itself, a set of conventions.”87 Manner-ism and modernism share a strategy of serialization, such that harmony and order are disconnected from representation and have to be found in the diagonal and discordant relations between their vari-ous components (e.g., the folds that run between text and music [TF, 136]), none of which is subordinate to another. Seri-alization is not merely a set of techniques (the serialization of pitch, timbre, dura-

tion, and volume within the conventional milieu of the timbres of instruments of West-ern classical music, Western equal temperament, and the formal concert performance), but a direction toward an infinite potential for musical variety. In this sense, musical modernism is a process that can occur at various moments in music history. Musical infinity, writes Adam Harper, “necessitates an n-dimensional modernism. Its egalitarian serialization—in individual musical works or among a group of works—can approach infinity, increasing in scope and richness as it goes, but will never actually reach it, and so modernism can only ever amount to a relative direction rather than a fixed state.”88

Modernism shares more tendencies with mannerism than with the baroque. This is because both mannerism and modernism are defined less by the established procedures that guarantee their overall unity than by their capacity of immanent deviation from them.


Thus although it is true that composers such as Schoenberg or Alban Berg avoid all-too- harmonic compositions and mainly compose with dissonances while mannerists still sub-ordinate expressive dissonances to consonances,89 these dissonances are not repressed and reallocated as they are in the baroque. Rather, this pattern of a mannerist crisis in art that tends to be neutralized or sublimated by baroque overcoding has recurred several times in the history of art. It has often been argued, however, that today, after the total aestheticization of politics and the total politicization of art, the relevance of the total work of art can only lie in its failure, where it reveals its principal openness, its unformed interstices, and its fragmentary nature. We should wonder therefore if, instead of inter-preting the recent artistic past in terms of a “neo-baroque,” it might henceforth be more adequate to speak of a “neo-mannerism.”

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1 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 338.

2 Ibid.; our emphasis.

3 Ibid., 340.

4 Ibid., 343.

5 Deleuze, The Fold, 136–37; Deleuze, Negotia-tions, 155, 157–59, 163. Hereafter, all page number references to The Fold will appear parenthetically in the body of the text (TF).

6 Lang, Music in Western Civilization, 316.

7 Maniates, Mannerism in Italian Music and Cul-ture, 107.

8 For a fuller account of these concepts than the following paragraphs, see van Tuinen, “Matter, Man-ner and Idea in Michelangelo and Deleuze.”

9 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 369.

10 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 160–61.

11 Ibid., 130–31.

12 Ibid., 9.

13 This argument is developed in van Tuinen, “Disegno: A Speculative Constructivist Interpretation.”

14 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 317.

15 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 137.

16 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 193.

17 Ibid.

18 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 138, 94.

19 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 28.

20 van Tuinen, “Mannerism, Baroque and Modern-ism in Deleuze,” 178.


22 This section is a condensed version of an argu-ment previously published in van Tuinen, “Mannerism, Baroque and Modernism in Deleuze,” esp. 176–80.


24 Ibid., 304, 300.

25 Ibid., 302.

26 Heller-Roazen, The Fifth Hammer, 61–65.

27 Maniates, Mannerism in Italian Music and Culture, 291.

28 Ibid., 203.

29 This new relation between theory and practice, still amplified by print technology due to which departures from the “original” composition become more deliberate, was also the basis of the controversy between Giovanni Maria Artusi and Claudio Monte-verdi on the use of “unprepared” sevenths to express extreme affections. In L’Artusi, overo, delle imperfet-tioni della moderna musica (1600), the conservative Artusi rejected the new ways of composing in which the actual execution became key in the process of composing as these can only lead to “deformations of the nature and propriety of true harmony, far removed from the musician’s goal” (Artusi, “From Artusi, or, Of the Imperfections of Modern Music,” 527). Instead, the execution of a musical piece should consist in the most precise representation of a com-positional structure. By contrast, Monteverdi made his celebrated distinction between prima prattica and seconda prattica in order to demonstrate how, instead of trying to rid itself of the existing tradition, the new practice of going further in exploring the possibilities of performance (i.e., beginning with de Rore) can only exist historically as a redundancy in relation to a former practice (i.e., that of Adriaan Willaert and Gioseffo Zarlino).

30 Shearman, Mannerism, 97.

Notes


31 Burmeister, Musical Poetics, 16–17, quoted in Maniates, Mannerism in Italian Music and Culture, 210–12.

32 Zarlino, The Art of Counterpoint, 51.

33 Ibid., 53, 61–62.

34 Galilei, Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music, 212–13.

35 Heller-Roazen, The Fifth Hammer, 68. See also Galilei, Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music, 214–15.

36 Heller-Roazen, The Fifth Hammer, 68.

37 Ibid., 72–73.

38 Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era, 12.

39 With respect to modernism, the inverse is at stake: “It should not be thought that music has forgot-ten how to sing in a now mechanical and atomized world; rather, an immense coefficient of variation is affecting and carrying away all of the phatic, aphatic, linguistic, poetic, instrumental, or musical parts of a single sound assemblage” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 96–97).

40 Ibid., 304. Deleuze and Guattari distinguish two ways of machining the voice, both dating from the sixteenth century: “Machining the voice was the first musical operation. As we know, the prob-lem was resolved in Western music in two different ways, in Italy and in England: the head voice of the countertenor, who sings ‘above his voice,’ or whose voice operates inside the sinuses and at the back of the throat and the palate without relying on the diaphragm or passing through the bronchial tubes; and the stomach voice of the castrati, ‘stronger, more voluminous, more languid,’ as if they gave carnal mat-ter to the imperceptible, impalpable, and aerial” (ibid., 303).


42 From book 4 of the Madrigals onward, Monte-verdi uses not only a musical rhetoric in the illustra-tion of poetic images, but also one used in shading textual detail, thus representing a new concept of vocal music. Contrast Svogava con le stelle, in which harmonic coloring and declamatory freedom comple-ment the passionate nature of Ottavio Rinuccini’s text, with Si ch’io vorrei morire, which consists of stylistically contrasting episodes where chords and tonal affirma-tion alternate with dissonance, chromaticism and counterpoint. The last pieces of book 5 mark a fun-damental break with the traditional madrigal form by writing obligatory basso continuo parts, supplemented in later books with the use of instrumental ritornelli. Chamber monody prevails from book 7 onward in concertante style. Monteverdi seems effortlessly to have reconciled the two opposing forces and to have exploited them as a means of achieving coherence and maximum dramatic effect.

43 Shearman, Mannerism, 99–104; see also Alfred Einstein, The Italian Madrigal. As Christopher Hasty explains, “it is helpful to remember that performance (per-formare) means to actually, really form (per- here is an intensive). What is not per-formed is thus not truly of fully formed” (“The Image of Thought and Ideas of Music,” 5).

44 As Maniates summarizes: “The polyphonic madrigal, with its minute word painting and rampant chromaticism, the concerted madrigal, with its solois-tic voices and expressive dissonances, the solo song, with its florid diminutions, and monodic recitation, with its dramatic impact, all belong to the same arena of radical maniera, of musical mannerism—‘the most extremely experimental period in the history of art save for the present’” (Mannerism in Italian Music and Culture, 282–83).

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45 Luzzasco Luzzaschi’s Madrigali per cantare e sonare (1601) mark the transition from polyphony to monody, while monodies proper began with Giulio Caccini’s Le nuove musiche (1602) (Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era, 31).


47 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 313. Rhythm is a difference or a relation; it isn’t a consequence of the measure of a milieu, but rather a primary constituent of it, since there is no milieu that stands on its own. It is the genesis of continuity, a massing of structure and texture, the production of a total abstract effect through non-resembling means: “a milieu does in fact exist by virtue of a periodic repetition, but one whose only effect is to produce a difference by which the milieu passes into another milieu. It is the difference that is rhythmic, not the repetition, which, nevertheless produces it; productive repetition has nothing to do with reproductive meter” (ibid., 314).


49 Ibid., 332.

50 Ibid., 280–81.

51 From a conservative, classicizing perspective, musical progress is seen as a natural, organic, homo-geneous evolution toward technical and emotional perfection. Modern practices are invariantly dismissed as unruly and extravagant deformations that result in absurd music. Writers more attuned to the new key of mannerist progress instead emphasize the “singularity” of the “manners” of composing. For example, in 1592 Agostino Michele comments on the musical scene of the late sixteenth century as follows: “Take music, in which many years ago Josquin and Willaert flourished; in the past age, Rore and Lasso were famous; and in these days Marenzio and Vecchi become singular and illustrious; and nevertheless their manners of

composing are so different that it seems they are not practitioners of the same art” (Michele, Discorso in cui contra l’opinione di tutti i piùillustri scrittori dell’arte poetica chiarmanente si dimonstra, quoted in Maniates, Mannerism in Italian Music and Culture, 124).

52 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 98.


54 An example of such a line of flight is the man-nerist tendency toward laceramento della poesia as opposed to improvised ornamentation at the service of the text. One of its first instances is found in Corteccia or Caccini. In this technique the composer treats the verse with a certain liberty in such a way that it enforces the composition. The friction between the music and the poetry is already present in the fact that many of these verses are written in the first person singular and sung as such, while they was performed by several voices—the first person plural. Another line of flight is of course the emancipation of instrumental music from vocal music. While tradition-ally voice and instrument had been treated equally, this changes with inventions such as the toccata, canzona (canzon da sonar) and ricercar. The ricercar (to seek again) is characterized by concise themes in long note values and begins with Giovanni Gabrieli and Claudio Merulo. Once the ricercar settled down to a monothematic version—Girolamo Frescobaldi is the transition figure—the baroque fuga (flight, the successive presentation of a single theme by different voices) was created. Thus whereas in mannerism it is merely the expression of the search itself that is central to the composition, like a process without an aim, the baroque seeks a higher unity outside its expressions. Although a crisis is present in the mono-thematic fugue, the unity that prevails throughout the composition is its preestablished solution or tension relief. The mannerist ricercar is therefore closer related to the Deleuzian line of flight than the baroque fugue.



56 Deleuze, L’abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze.

57 Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 188–89.



60 Ibid.; see also Deleuze, Two Regimes of Mad-ness, 160.


62 With the invention of monody, expressly designed for a single voice and devoid of support-ing counterpoint, there was no need to write out a separate accompaniment, which could be reduced to a single line, the continuous bass, with the now vestigial inner parts merely suggested by figures and accidentals to indicate which notes above the bass line should be sounded in order to produce a full harmony. The organist, harpsichordist, or archlutenist plays along from the score or, more usually, from the lowest voice part, filling out the texture where necessary, or a singer can even accompany himself.

63 Caccini, Le nuove musiche, 3–4.

64 Although the nineteenth-century German music theorist Hugo Riemann was the first to use the term “functional harmony,” he derived it from Jean-Philippe Rameau, the main music theorist of the baroque with his major work Treatise on Harmony (1722).

65 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 95–96; see also Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Phi-losophy?, 190–91.

66 “Music became theatrical in the age of opera. Painting became theatrical at a time when the frescoes in churches and palaces resembled painted

scenery. Architecture became theatrical as builders stressed mass and movement. Sculpture became theatrical, as in the case of Bernini’s chapel in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome, where members of the Cornaro family are shown watching the transverberation of St. Teresa from a balcony that resembles a box in a theater” (Burke, “The Crisis in the Arts of the Seventeenth Century: A Crisis of Representation?,” 250). With the theatricalization of music in mature baroque operas another interesting tendency comes to the surface. The more dramatic the plays and the acting become, the more music has to reinforce its presence and becomes more and more bombastic and pompous, as in Giacomo Meyerbeer’s operas.

67 Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era, 61.

68 Ibid., 55.

69 Shearman, Mannerism, 126.


71 Ibid., 25; cf. Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, 28.

72 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 42–50. The musical analogue of bel composto is bel canto, in which music is coordinated with words, vocal and instrumental music become of equal importance, con-trapuntal texture is reinstituted, modes are reduced to major and minor, and melodic themes become shorter and more polished, organized by stylized dance pat-terns (cadences) with stereotyped anticipations of the final integration of bass and melody (Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era, 17, 118–19).

73 Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 60.

74 Deleuze, Negotiations, 165.

75 Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, 19.

76 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 101.

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79 Ibid., 343.

80 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 187, 208.

81 Deleuze, The Fold, 137; translation modified; see also p. 82; and Deleuze, Two Regimes of Madness, 293, 369. In The Fold, the difference between classi-cism and modernism is explained by a change of artis-tic model for the philosophical concept of the monad: “Something has changed in the situation of monads, between the former model, the closed chapel with imperceptible openings, and the new model invoked by Tony Smith, the sealed car speeding down the highway” (136–37). In terms of A Thousand Plateaus, modern constructivism does not look for monads that “annex the body and exterior space, respectively, to the immobile house,” but rather for “the weaving of the nomad” that “indexes clothing and the house itself to the space of the outside, to the open smooth space in which the body moves” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 476).

82 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 296; cf. Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 101. “When Boulez casts himself in the role of histo-rian of music, he does so in order to show how a great musician, in a very different manner in each case, invents a kind of diagonal running between the har-monic vertical and the melodic horizon. And in each case it is a different diagonal, a different technique, a creation. Moving along this transversal line, which is really a line of deterritorialization, there is a sound block that no longer has a point of origin, since it is always and already in the middle of the line; and no longer has horizontal and vertical coordinates, since it creates its own coordinates; and no longer forms a localizable connection from one point to another, since it is in ‘nonpulsed time’: a deterritorialized rhyth-mic block that has abandoned points, coordinates,

and measure, like a drunken boat that melds with the line or draws a plane of consistency. Speeds and slow-nesses inject themselves into musical form, sometimes impelling it to proliferation, linear microproliferations, and sometimes to extinction, sonorous abolition, involution, or both at once” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 296).

83 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues II, 94.

84 Ibid., 33.

85 Ibid., 94. “It is also characteristic of modern music to relinquish projection and the perspectives that impose pitch, temperament, and chromatism, so as to give the sonorous plane a singular thickness to which very diverse elements bear witness: the devel-opment of studies for the piano, which cease being just technical and become ‘compositional studies’ (with the extension given to them by Debussy); the decisive importance assumed by the orchestra with Berlioz; the rise of timbre in Stravinsky and Boulez; the proliferation of percussive affects with metals, skins, and woods, and their combination with wind instru-ments to constitute blocs inseparable from the mate-rial (Varèse): the redefinition of the percept according to noise, to raw and complex sound (Cage); not only the enlargement or chromatism to other components of pitch but the tendency to a nonchromatic appear-ance of sound in an infinite continuum (electronic or electroacoustic music)” (Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 195).

86 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 296. In a “punctual system,” “musical representation, on the one hand, draws a horizontal, melodic line, the bass line, upon which other melodic lines are super-posed; points are assigned that enter into relations of counterpoint between lines. On the other hand, it draws a vertical, harmonic line or plane, which moves along the horizontals but is no longer dependent upon them; it runs from high to low and defines a chord capable of linking up with the following chords.”


In a “multilinear system,” by contrast, “everything happens at once: the line breaks free of the point as origin; the diagonal breaks free of the vertical and the horizontal as coordinates; and the transversal breaks free of the diagonal as a localizable connection between two points. In short, a block-line passes amid (au milieu des) sounds and propels itself by its own nonlocalizable middle (milieu). The sound block is the intermezzo. It is a body without organs, an antimemory pervading musical organization, and is all the more sonorous” (ibid., 295, 297).

87 Harper, Infinite Music, 2.

88 Ibid., 5.


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IMAGE: Altoon Sultan TWO OVALS AND A RECTANGLE, 2014Hand-dyed wool on linen, 18 1/4 x 12 in.

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Brewing Dissonance: Conceptualizing Mannerism and Baroque in Music (with Deleuze) (2013)

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