Martin Scherzinger

Media Theorist, Musicologist, and Composer

Musical Modernism in the Thought of ‘Mille Plateaux,’ and Its Twofold Politics

This piece examines the specific use of modernist musical aesthetics in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s text Mille plateaux, particularly the music and writing of Pierre Boulez. The philosophical figure of the ‘musical synthesizer’ is derived in part from the emerging popularity of a new musical instrument in the late 1970s, but mainly from Boulez’s writings on musical modernism nearly two decades earlier. Many of the key concepts in Mille Plateaux draw on Boulez’s discussion of the refinements of our perception of timbre with reference to a “hyperinstrument’, (synthesizer-to-come); which had the imagined capacity to ‘assemble modules, source elements, and elements for treating sound (oscillators, generators, and transformers)’. The paper investigates points of convergence and divergence between Boulez’s texts and Mille Plateaux, showing how the tensions inherent to the translations of technical musical concepts (such as striated and smooth) results in philosophical ambiguities, which in turn imply two distinct formulations of politics.

Wagner Redux: Badiou on Music for the Future

Alain Badiou’s book Five lessons on Wagner contests and revises the widespread critical reception of Richard Wagner. Badiou offers a counterpoint to 6 charges made against the composer: (1) Wagner created seductively sensual musical edifices; (2) Wagner indulges identitarian thought; (3) Wagner spectacularizes suffering; (4) Wagner’s musical forms contain differences in a false unity; (5) Wagner theatricalizes the drama; and (6) Wagner’s temporalities are underwritten by the latent telos of affirmative dialectics. Badiou argues against these charges point by point. Badiou then shifts attention away from plot structures and toward the music’s formal protocols. For Badiou, musicalized transitions proffer vectors for transformation beyond the conceptual scope of plot meanings alone. The paper describes and evaluates Badiou’s claims. Using Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as a central referent, the paper argues that Badiou unwittingly construes music as a signifying medium at argumentatively crucial junctures, which permits an equivocal case of Wagner to persist.