Abstract

This chapter provides an account of the relation between Deleuze’s philosophy and music. It begins with an outline of Deleuze’s engagement with music, individually and in collaboration with Guattari, accounting both for direct engagement with composers, performers, and works, and for philosophical notions with musical provenance. Topics covered here include temporal and perceptual themes in Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s explicit writing on music, their engagement with composers including Pierre Boulez, Olivier Messiaen, and John Cage, their account of modernism, and their notion of the refrain as it appears in A Thousand Plateaus in particular. It then turns to the engagement with and uptake of Deleuze’s thought in music and music scholarship. Topics here include the influence of Deleuze on composers and other musicians inside and outside of ‘art music’, adaptations of Deleuze’s thought in the theorisation of music beyond Deleuze’s own primary concerns, such as jazz and other Afrodiasporic musics, and the use of Deleuzian ideas such as the assemblage in musicology and sound studies. It closes with some reflections on the significance of the apparent unfaithfulness of some adaptations of Deleuze’s thought and on how we might understand Deleuze’s modernism today.