Abstract
This thesis brings together my music improvisation and composition and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of time, for the purpose of creating a musical-philosophical concept I am calling Rhythmicity. In three practice as research projects, I set out to investigate how music and philosophy can work together to make a fresh contribution to both fields, as well being of relevance to scholarship in practice as research in music, Deleuze studies, experimental music, and Performance Philosophy.
I argue that the relationship between music and philosophy can be understood in rhythmic terms, as a complex interdisciplinary movement operating in multiple dimensions. Rhythmicity is evolved by incorporating the insights of each project/chapter into the apparatus of its successor/s. In this way, the temporal dimensions of Rhythmicity are plotted in a series of interlinked movements: in Chapter One, as a simultaneous cyclical and hyperbolic movement of the musical-philosophical as experienced by the reader-listener; in Chapter Two, as a complex folding of multiple possible movements and harmonic combinations in what I call a tonality of time; and, in Chapter Three, as a temporal line-cycle intertwining the musical and the philosophical expressed in the triple perspective of composer, performer, listener, and what I call the Rhythmicity of silences.
Alongside offering a concept of the ways in which music and philosophy interact, I conclude that Rhythmicity provides a way to rethink the temporal in respect of how we model its movements and relationships. Through the models of temporal interaction devised in each chapter, Deleuze’s concepts are transformed via their incorporation into the musical-philosophical mix. In addition, music improvisation and composition are shown to be utilisable for more than the making of music alone, with the thesis providing fresh insight for the fields of music practice as research and Performance Philosophy in respect of its uniqueness of process and output.