The Autonomy of Expression and the Becoming Musical of Classicism, Romanticism, and Modernism
The Autonomy of Expression and the Becoming Musical of Classicism, Romanticism, and Modernism

Summary/Abstract: This article reconstructs Deleuze and Guattari’s history of music in relation to their notion of stratification and defends the view that music is an organization of sounds. Tracing a history of becoming music, this article demonstrates how social conditions impact the organization of sound into music and how music transforms those same social formations. Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of double articulation, a regime of content and a level of expression, provides a rubric to understand how sonic material is organized into determinate musical elements, notes, tones, rhythms, and so on. This article argues that as the articulation of expression grows independent of content, there is a commensurate increase in what can become musical.

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