i

The Virtuality of the Compositional

Model: Varèse with Deleuze

Luc Döbereiner
Berlin

W hile the work of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze has only

recently begun to receive attention by music scholars, it has already proved to
be transformative for musical problems in musicological theory and compositional
practice. To date, much theoretical work has been focused on the role of music gen-
erally in Deleuze’s overall philosophical project,1 on the signi�cance of particular
concepts developed or explicated by Deleuze and his collaborator Félix Guattari vis-
à-vis musical works, and on possible implications for the status and practice of music
theory as theory.2 Edward Campbell has recently explored productive new ways of
thinking about a wide range of musical and compositional approaches, as well as
aspects of musical semiotics, through central Deleuzian concepts.3 The present ar-
ticle, however, is rather more focused on compositional thought, and speci�cally
on that of the composer Edgard Varèse. In contrast to the works of Pierre Boulez
and Olivier Messiaen, Varèse’s work has thus far received relatively little attention
by scholars working on Deleuze and music. Like few other philosophers, Deleuze
tried to take theoretical account of properly artistic thought, that is, he focused on
the problems and ideas facing the creator rather than the audience or theorist. This
article relates musical ideas and philosophical concepts in order theoretically to ar-
ticulate central aspects of Varèse’s compositional thought and shed light on some
of its possible epistemological and ontological repercussions and presuppositions.
Varèse often described his music in spatial terms. He spoke of masses, volumes,
planes, projections, and processes of crystallization. Much musicological work has
been dedicated to detecting these ideas in Varèse’s treatment of pitch, form, rhythm,
and instrumentation in order to translate these notions into more tangible and
concrete compositional concepts.4 Due to the notorious analytical intractability of

1 See, e.g., Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Music, Painting, and the Arts (New York: Routledge, 2003);
Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, “Music and the Di�erence in Becoming,” in Sounding the Virtual: Gilles
Deleuze and the Theory and Philosophy of Music, ed. Brian Hulse and Nick Nesbitt (Farnham: Ash-
gate, 2010), 199–226.
2 See, e.g., Brian Hulse, “Thinking Musical Di�erence: Music Theory as Minor Science,” in Hulse
and Nesbitt, Sounding the Virtual, 23–50.
3 Edward Campbell, Music after Deleuze (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
4 See, e.g., Jonathan W. Bernard, “Pitch/Register in the Music of Edgard Varèse,” Music Theory Spec-
trum 3 (1981): 1–25; Helga de la Motte-Haber, Die Musik von Edgard Varèse (Hofheim: Wolke, 1993);

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268 Luc Döbereiner

Varèse’s music, however, any attempt at analysis has further to develop and question
its own analytical tools. Similarly, due to the problematic status of Varèse’s central
concepts and ways of describing his compositional work, their exegesis requires
rethinking of its own theoretical resources to establish new cross-connections to
other modes of thought. It is not my objective here to give a philological account of
the in�uences and formation of Varèse’s concepts, but rather to grasp them anew
and illuminate aspects and connections that are less often considered by reading
them through the philosophical thinking of Deleuze.
Bringing Deleuze and Varèse together is not an arbitrary act. Deleuze knew the
work of Varèse and occasionally referred to it in his writings, and they shared some
philosophical references, such as Henri Bergson and, most surprisingly, the work
of the rather occult Polish-French Messianist and post-Kantian philosopher Hoëné
Wronski. They also both shared a rejection of representation and sought to construct
anti-representational modes of thought, Deleuze by developing concepts of di�er-
ence and the virtual, Varèse by liberating the spatial corporeality of sound. Varèse’s
“liberation of sound” is an attempt to free sound from its bondage to arbitrary pre-
existing musical forms and the tempered tuning system, and to emancipate noise.
Varèse drew on the work of his friend and teacher, Ferruccio Busoni, who had al-
ready detected in his 1907 Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst not only the
exhaustion of functional harmony, but also the limitation of octave identity, the tem-
pered tuning system, and the “sign,” that is, representation of sound as such: “And so,
in music the signs (Zeichen) have assumed greater consequence (bedeutsamer) than
that for which they ought to stand (bedeuten), and can only suggest (andeuten).”5 For
Varèse, a future music must be a music “based on the sound and beyond notes,”6 that
is, it must be a music that overcomes the limitations of the “note” and opens itself up
to the multi-dimensional intensity of material sonorous vibration. Deleuze’s think-
ing can help us to grasp Varèse’s compositional concepts because it is thinking that
de�es representation and tries to develop an “aesthetics of di�erence that escapes
representation.”7 The focus here, therefore, is not on music’s general resistance to
representation,8 but rather on the question of how an ideal yet non-representational
dimension of composition can be thought.
For both Varèse and Deleuze, the concept of space is of great importance for
thought that overcomes representation. The status of this pivotal concept is equiv-

Dieter A. Nanz, Edgard Varèse: Die Orchesterwerke (Berlin: Lukas Verlag, 2003); Iakovos Steinhauer,
Musikalischer Raum und kompositorischer Gegenstand bei Edgard Varèse (Tutzing: Hans Schneider,
2008).
5 Ferruccio Busoni, Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music, trans. Theodore Baker (New York: Schirmer,
1911), 24.
6 Edgard Varèse, Écrits, ed. Louise Hirbour, trans. Christiane Léaud (Paris: C. Bourgois, 1983), 12.
7 James Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Di�erence and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide (Ed-
inburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003), 75.
8 See Christopher Hasty, “The Image of Thought and Ideas of Music,” in Hulse and Nesbitt, Sounding
the Virtual, 1–22.

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The Virtuality of the Compositional Model: Varèse with Deleuze 269

ocal in Varèse’s work, for it cannot be reduced to either “real” physical or musical
space. Music scholars have, thus, interpreted Varèse’s musical space in a number of
di�erent ways; spatial movement appears to take over the traditional technique of
counterpoint,9 space seems to stand for a superseding architectonic idea of form by
a process-oriented idea,10 and physical space seems to allow for a projection or ap-
pearance of the “intelligent body” that is a musical object, thus creating a dialectical
tension between physical sound space and musical space.11 In the present article,
Deleuze’s concept of smooth or intensive space provide a new reading of this cen-
tral category, which is located at the intersection of compositional technique, the
conception of form, and sound reproduction.
While both Varèse and Deleuze critically move beyond established ways of think-
ing, they do not merely reject historical categories, but rather appropriate, rein-
terpret, and rede�ne them. Varèse develops a new relation between “melody” and
“harmony” conceived in terms of lines and vertical structures, or planes and �g-
ures, and his idea of “transmutation” functions as a rede�nition of the traditional
compositional principle and musical form of variation. Deleuze develops an “anti-
Platonic” notion of the idea and rede�nes concepts such as the transcendental, struc-
ture, sign, or sensation. The images that Deleuze and Varèse employ in the devel-
opment of their philosophical and artistic conceptual edi�ces and their references
to the sciences, such as physical, chemical, biological, and geological processes, as
well as non-Euclidean geometry and di�erential calculus, retain a problematic sta-
tus in the works of both, since it is not altogether evident to what extent they
are not merely descriptive metaphors. I assume here that these “images” and ref-
erences are not mere metaphors, for a hasty rejection will surely prevent any un-
derstanding, and will rather consider them as—to borrow an expression from Alain
Badiou—“conditions” of their thought.

The Ontological Status of the Compositional Model

In their 1980 volume A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari identify two op-
posed ways of conceptualizing what they term “the plan(e).” These are two dis-
tinct manners of thinking about the dimensions of creation, a “localized absolute”12
shared by singular conceptual acts of creation. The ambiguous formulation “plan(e)”
stands both for an ontologically �at and thus non-hierarchical plane or conceptual
horizon that serves to orient philosophical thought, and for a plan or structure of
artistic composition. What Deleuze and Guattari proceed to delineate can be under-
stood as two forms of conceiving the ontological status of a compositional model

9 Jonathan Bernard, The Music of Edgard Varèse (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987), 42.
10 Nanz, Varèse: Die Orchesterwerke, 412–15.
11 Steinhauer, Musikalischer Raum, 36.
12 Peter Hallward, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London: Verso, 2006),
144.

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270 Luc Döbereiner

as a dimension both of artistic creation and of philosophical thought. They start

by describing the “plan(e) of organization or development” as a “hidden principle,
which makes visible what is seen and audible what is heard.”13 This plane is both
structural, in that it determines organization, and genetic, in that it concerns the
development of forms. While giving rise to what is given, seen, or heard, the plane
itself remains not a given, but instead exists in a supplementary and impercepti-
ble dimension apart from the forms it engenders. The compositional principle gives
rise to musical forms, but it is itself conceived apart from these forms, which are its
realization or concretization. It is thus a plan(e) of transcendence specifying propor-
tions, relations, development, and structure. While it is to a certain degree immanent
to what is given, such as the seed to the tree, it remains nonetheless absent.
The tree is given in the seed, but as a function of a plan(e) that is not given. The same applies to
music. The developmental or organizational principle does not appear in itself, in a direct rela-
tion with that which develops or is organized: There is a transcendent compositional principle
that is not of the nature of sound, that is not “audible” by itself or for itself.14

Deleuze and Guattari see an example of such an inaudible compositional model in

the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen, which they interpret as being based on a tran-
scendent hidden unity, a principle that creates forms, but never appears itself and
can only be inferred from these forms. Indeed, this way of thinking is most present
and clearly discernible in Stockhausen’s serial music of the 1950s. Defending the
inaudibility of the serial order, Stockhausen writes, “Who sees the atoms? And yet,
everybody knows that all material appearance depends on their structure.”15 While
Stockhausen continuously reconceived the nature of musical material in his works,
all of his compositional concepts remain to a certain extent transcendent of the ac-
tual music. Though his later concept of the “formula,” a musical miniature unity that
contains both micro- and macroform, is less removed from what it gives rise to, it
is precisely its total ubiquity that lends it super-worldly status. The formula, that
all encompassing and “most general musical genetics,”16 is quite literally conceived
on the basis of an idea of an abstract plan in the mind of a god. Deleuze and Guat-
tari contrast this transcendent plan(e) with the “plane of consistency” or the “plane
of immanence,” which is no longer concerned with structure and the development
or production of forms, but only with “relations of movement and rest, speed and
slowness between unformed elements” and thereby, instead, with the dissolution
of actual forms. This plane “never has a supplementary dimension”17 from which

13 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 265.
14 Ibid., 266.
15 Karlheinz Stockhausen, Texte zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik, ed. Dieter Schnebel, vol.
1: 1952–1962: Aufsätze zur Theorie des Komponierens (Cologne: DuMont, 1963), 50 (my translation).
16 Karlheinz Stockhausen, Texte zur Musik, ed. Christoph von Blumröder, vol. 4: 1970–1977: Werk-
Einführungen, elektronische Musik, Weltmusik, Vorschläge und Standpunkte zum Werk Anderer
(Cologne: DuMont, 1978), 583 (my translation).
17 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 266.

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The Virtuality of the Compositional Model: Varèse with Deleuze 271

a hidden principle could work, rather it is itself given along with that to which it
gives rise. It has, therefore, no abstractly conceived design or plan. The plan(e) thus
does not have a dimension of unrealized potentiality or possibilities removed from
real musical events, but instead acts from within the actually audible itself. It is the
immanent compositional model that is itself audible.

Certain modern musicians oppose the transcendent plan(e) of organization, which is said to
have dominated all of Western classical music, to the immanent sound plane, which is always
given along with that to which it gives rise, brings the imperceptible to perception, and car-
ries only di�erential speeds and slownesses in a kind of molecular lapping. . . . Or rather it is
a question of a freeing of time, Aeon, a nonpulsed time for a �oating music, as Boulez says,
an electronic music in which forms are replaced by pure modi�cations of speed. It is undoubt-
edly John Cage who �rst and most perfectly deployed this �xed sound plane, which a�rms
a process against all structure and genesis, a �oating time against pulsed time or tempo, ex-
perimentation against any kind of interpretation, and in which silence as sonorous rest also
marks the absolute state of movement.18

This plane of immanence is an expression of what is perhaps the most fundamental

aspect of Deleuze’s ontology, the idea that being is univocal. For Deleuze there is
only one mode of being, everything that there is, has the same being and speaks
with “a single voice.”19 The most in�uential philosopher for Deleuze here is Baruch
Spinoza, who likewise tries to construct a radically univocal and pantheist ontology
without transcendent divinity: “Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be con-
ceived without God.”20 For Deleuze, philosophy is ontology and creates concepts in
unmediated thought oriented by the plane of immanence. Regarding the compati-
bility of Deleuze’s philosophy with a cosmic pantheism, Peter Hallward argues that
“Deleuze’s work tends to proceed broadly in line with a theophanic conception of
things, whereby every individual process or thing is conceived as a manifestation
or expression of God.”21 The notions of the virtual and the actual—on which I fo-
cus below—are designed, on one hand, to grasp the multiplicity of creatures and,
on the other, to encompass the oneness of being that re�ects the idea of the in-
�nitely multiple expression of the concept of one in Spinoza’s attributes. The ques-
tion Deleuze addresses in his writings on cinema, music, literature, and painting
is orientation: how to proceed from passive material creatures to virtual, dynamic
acts of creation? How can the material overcome its �nitude and “pass into sensa-
tion,” since art “wants to create the �nite that restores the in�nite” and to create an
“opening onto the plane of composition that restores the in�nite in us?”22

18 Ibid., 267.
19 Gilles Deleuze, Di�erence and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Continuum, 1994), 44.
20 Benedictus de Spinoza, The Essential Spinoza: Ethics and Related Writings (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett
Publishing Company, 2006), Part 1, Prop. 15.
21 Hallward, Out of This World, 4.
22 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham
Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 197.

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272 Luc Döbereiner

The plane of composition, or plane of immanence, moves away from identi�-

cation and toward depersonalization and “becoming imperceptible,” which Deleuze
formulates in a way that resonates strongly with the work of John Cage: “How can
we rid ourselves of ourselves, and demolish ourselves?”23 For Cage, creation is a mat-
ter of the dissipation of the subject. He draws here, among other sources, on another
theophanic thinker, Meister Eckhart, whom Cage quotes frequently. Like Spinoza,
Meister Eckhart sees God in all creatures and all creatures in God. Spinoza and
Deleuze, however, embrace a positive and a�rmative “deterritorialization,” that is,
escape from territory and creature determination toward virtual potentiality. Meis-
ter Eckhart, instead, appears to arrive at an idea of mystical self-extinction. It is
extinction, letting go, that turns “the life that is divided into the life that is united,”24
as Meister Eckhart writes on the topic of death. John Cage states, “Activity involv-
ing in a single process the many, turning them . . . towards oneness, contributes to
a good way of life.”25 Although God resides in the multiplicity of all creatures, they
are “a pure nothing” (reine Abgeschiedenheit), and proximity to God, the One, is to
be sought in pure detachment, which is “nearly nothing.”26 Similarly, for Cage com-
position or the treatment of musical material is “a means of experiencing nothing.”27
Cage’s ostensible celebration of the here and now has to be considered together with
the superiority of the uncreated on which it relies. It is ultimately a turning away
from the made, constructed, or composed in favor of the not-created. We witness
here Cage’s distance from Varèse, who will not let go and thus, “rather than dealing
with sounds as sounds, he deals with them as Varèse,”28 which we can compare to
his critique of Schoenberg that “there is not enough of nothing in it.”29
In the remainder of this article I address the question of the ontological status of
the compositional model in Varèse’s work as grasped in Deleuzean concepts. How
can the compositional thought of Varèse be included in this opposition of the plane
of organization (Stockhausen) and the plane of consistency/immanence (Cage)? I
�rst focus on the central category in Varèse’s compositional thought, space, and I
approach it with the Deleuzean notions of intensive space. I then address the concept
of the virtual. Finally, I deal with questions relating to force and matter.

23 Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (London: Continuum,
2005), 69.
24 Franz Pfei�er, ed., The Works of Meister Eckhart (White�sh, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 1992), 207.
25 John Cage, Silence (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 63.
26 Pfei�er, The Works of Meister Eckhart, 341.
27 Cage, Silence, 114.
28 Ibid., 84.
29 Ibid., 79.

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The Virtuality of the Compositional Model: Varèse with Deleuze 273

Smooth and Striated, Intensive and Extensive Space

Deleuze’s overturning of Platonism is directed against any kind of “essentialism”
and against the conscious or implicit assumption of pre-existing forms and original
models that are to be realized or instantiated. He thus rejects the similar or resem-
blance and actuality as imitating or approximating transcendent forms. Deleuze,
therefore, begins with pure “di�erence in intensity” and not with preformed or fully
realized individual identity “as the reason behind qualitative diversity.”30 As Deleuze
expounds in one of his most original works, Di�erence and Repetition (originally pub-
lished in 1968), di�erence is not the di�erence between two given identities, and it
is not the empirical “di�erence ‘between’ two things,” but rather it is something
that “distinguishes itself.”31 In the �rst instance, therefore, di�erence is neither con-
tradiction nor opposition nor negation, and it is not lack of similarity, but rather
di�erence from itself, which subsequently gives rise to identities. The impetus for
any change or movement is self-distinguishing di�erence in intensity.
The intensive, constituted by di�erence, is opposed to the extensive. In physi-
cal terms, the intensive is associated with properties such as temperature, pressure,
density, speed, and tension, while the extensive is associated with qualities such as
length, area, and volume. In contrast to extensive qualities, which can be divided and
added, intensive qualities are indivisible. Dividing density or temperature, for exam-
ple, does not yield a new quality, and these properties cannot be added, but rather
relate to each other as average qualities. Most important, intensive di�erences are
productive and instigate processes of restoration of an equilibrium. Their extensive
quantities are being canceled out, hence making them secondary: “Just as intensive
quantities seem to be canceled, so problematic Ideas seem to disappear.”32 Similar to
problems, which are productive and are canceled out in solutions, intensive quali-
ties, such as tension or pressure, always stem from an internal self-di�erence and
therefore “a�rm di�erence”33 instead of being grounded in negation (as for Hegel)
and leading to change and movement.
There are, however, extensive qualities and spaces that are usually more visible
and that directly determine our social, political, and biological lives. These are met-
ric, measured, or “striated” spaces with clearly di�erentiated frontiers. Deleuze gives
a number of examples of how non-metric intensive di�erences or “smooth” spaces
precede extension.34 One such example from biology is the egg, a space of zones of

30 Deleuze, Di�erence and Repetition, 68.

31 Ibid., 36.
32 Ibid., 306.
33 Ibid., 239.
34 Deleuze explicitly names the demonstration of the precedence of intensive individuating di�erence
over extensive di�erences as one of his goals in the introduction to Di�erence and Repetition: “We
must show not only how individuating di�erence di�ers in kind from speci�c di�erence, but pri-
marily and above all how individuation properly precedes matter and form, species and parts, and
every other element of the constituted individual.” See Deleuze, Di�erence and Repetition, 38.

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274 Luc Döbereiner

intensity and potentiality, yet undi�erentiated and “smooth” in contrast to the fully
extensive body with developed organs that emerges from the intensive process of
embryogenesis. An egg demonstrates the process of qualitative di�erentiation, in
which an intensive, fuzzy space produces an “Euclidean” extensive spatial struc-
ture. As Manuel DeLanda writes on Deleuze and science, “the fertilized egg, de�ned
mostly by chemical gradients and polarities, as well as the early embryo de�ned by
neighborhoods with fuzzy borders . . . may be viewed as a topological space which
acquires a rigidly metric anatomical structure as tissues, organs and organ systems
become progressively better de�ned and relatively �xed in form.”35
The transition from intensity to extension displays an entirely anti-essentialist
morphogenesis. Form is not a pre-existent essence that exists apart from its material
support, nor can form be applied to matter. It is a rejection of Platonic archetypes
as well as Aristotelian hylomorphism. Form, instead, emerges from a process. In
Varèse’s music, operations such as projection, verticalization, rotation, stretching,
and compression give rise to form. Varèse rejects not only the idea of pre-established
forms that must be �lled, but also the reproach of formlessness made against mu-
sic that avoids standardized form schemes. “The misunderstanding has come from
thinking of form as a point of departure, a pattern to be followed, a mold to be �lled.
Form is a result—the result of a process. Each of my works discovers its own form.”36
Form is thus tied to a singular, material creative process.
Regarding his rejection of any ontology grounded in pre-constituted individual-
ity, Deleuze refers to the philosopher and cybernetics researcher, Gilbert Simondon,
who, “drawing on scienti�c studies of crystallization, rethinks the process of indi-
viduation as the result of the introduction of a ‘form’ in the guise of a structural
‘germ’ which catalyzes the actualization and reciprocal interaction of some of the
virtualities that had hitherto remained at the pre-individual level.”37 Simondon’s
crystallizing process of individuation opposes a dynamic spatio-temporal materi-
alism to the passivity of material determined by form. Similarly, Varèse draws on
crystallization to explain the emergence of form in his music. “The clearest answer
I can give people who ask me how I compose, is to say, ‘by crystallisation.’”38 The
form of a crystal is not pre-established, but it is “the consequence of the interaction
of attractive and repulsive forces and the ordered packing of the atom.”39 The exten-
sive crystal geometry is thus the result of the interaction of intensive forces. Varèse
was fascinated by the fact that, as mineralogist Nathaniel Arbiter put it, “in spite of
the relatively limited variety of internal structures, the external forms of crystals are

35 Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2002), 62.
36 Edgard Varèse and Chou Wen-chung, “The Liberation of Sound,” Perspectives of New Music 5, no. 1
(1966): 16.
37 Alberto Toscano, “Gilbert Simondon,” in Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage, ed. Graham Jones and Jon
Ro�e (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 386.
38 Edgard Varèse and Alcopley, “Edgard Varèse on Music and Art: A Conversation between Varèse
and Alcopley,” Leonardo 1, no. 2 (1968): 191.
39 Varèse and Chou, “The Liberation of Sound,” 16.

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The Virtuality of the Compositional Model: Varèse with Deleuze 275

limitless.”40 A cell-like idea of structural germs permeates Varèse’s works, which is

also indicated by the importance of successive transformational connections. “Each
new formation must result in some fashion from what has preceded it.”41
Varèse frequently attributed his conception of sound to the reading of Hermann
von Helmholtz’s highly in�uential book, On the Sensations of Tone (1863). Not only
can Varèse’s use of sirens and combination tones be traced back to Helmholtz, but
also a certain idea of musical space. Helmholtz describes a vertical dimension of
musical space in which musical objects can be placed and moved like bodies in space,
shifted and located next to each other:
Every melodic phrase, every chord, which can be executed at any pitch, can be also executed
at any other pitch in such a way that we immediately perceive the characteristic marks of their
similarity. On the other hand, also, di�erent voices, executing the same or di�erent melodic
phrases, can move at the same time within the compass of the scale, like two bodies in space. . . .
Such a close analogy consequently exists in all essential relations between the musical scale
and space, that even alteration of pitch has a readily recognized and unmistakable resemblance
to motion in space. . . . Hence, again, it becomes possible for motion in music to imitate the
peculiar characteristics of motive forces in space, that is, to form an image of the various
impulses and forces which lie at the root of motion.42

As Helmholtz explains, the spatiality of musical phrases depends most importantly

on the identity of the octave and the harmonic series, which produce a “de�nite-
ness and certainty in the measurement of intervals for our sensation,” so di�erent
from “mere di�erences of intensity (Intensitätsunterschiede) in our various sensual
perceptions.”43 Helmholtz’s pitch space is a metric space, based on identity and re-
lations, and he conceives of it as a condition of possibility of experience. Like Kan-
tian space, this conception of musical space grasps spatiality as the a priori form of
auditory sensibility; it is a metric and extensively “striated” space. For Deleuze, “be-
hind” or “beneath” every metric (i.e., measurable) frontier and division or cut, there
are zones of intensity from which these frontiers emerge. Consequently, sound and
musical space can be thought of in terms of both intensity and extension. First of all,
“in sound, intensity alone matters.”44 Sound as a pressure wave is a non-metric and
indivisible intensive force. As Deleuze and Guattari argue, there are two ways of
shaping or occupying pitch space: music can take place between these two types of
spaces, establishing complex relations between both. Frequencies can be distributed
irregularly or “statistically” in a smooth space, or within a given grid determined by
a modulus, that is, a standard imposition of a concrete (repetitive) pattern such as
the octave.

40 Ibid.
41 Bernard, “Pitch/Register in the Music of Edgard Varèse,” 5.
42 Hermann von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone as the Physiological Basis for the Theory of
Music, trans. Alexander J. Ellis (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1895), 370.
43 Ibid.
44 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 6.

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276 Luc Döbereiner

[T]he striated is that which intertwines �xed and variable elements, produces an order and
succession of distinct forms, and organizes horizontal melodic lines and vertical harmonic
planes. The smooth is the continuous variation, continuous development of form; it is the
fusion of harmony and melody in favor of the production of properly rhythmic values, the
pure act of the drawing of a diagonal across the vertical and the horizontal.45

To a certain extent, Varèse’s dream of spatialization and sound projection into phys-
ical space always functioned as a utopia (or “regulative idea”) orienting his compo-
sitional practice. Even when he �nally had the necessary means during the com-
position of Poème électronique, his contribution to the 1958 Philips Pavilion at the
World’s Fair in Brussels, this utopia cannot be said to have been fully realized.
The majority of works in Varèse’s œuvre do not employ acoustic sound spatial-
ization—though space is a ubiquitous notion in his music—since Varèse’s space is
both “real” performance space and a compositional concept. His notion of space is
indebted to Helmholtz, but it no longer relies exclusively on a grid determined by a
modulo.46 Rather, it strives for a continuous variation, a continuity in pitch space,
and the abolition of the notions of harmony and melody in favor of a “diagonal”:
“There will no longer be the old conception of melody or the interplay of melodies.
The entire work will be a melodic totality. The work will �ow as a river �ows.”47
The melodic totality is vibrating sound matter that contracts and expands, vertical-
izing and growing out of lines like the typical opening “melodies” played by wind
instruments, which can be found so frequently in Varèse’s œuvre.48 These diago-
nal melodies unfold and spread out vertically, creating an identity of melody and
harmony.
In Varèse’s work, the cyclic idea of the scale with octave identity is replaced by a
spiral staircase, which re�ects both the cyclical nature of pitch classes and the con-
tinuous verticality of frequency. The use of sirens, glissandi, and occasional quarter
tones attests to Varèse’s desire for “a continuous �owing curve that instruments
could not give me.”49 Varèse thereby passes from the measured striated to the con-
tinuous smooth space.50 A prime example is the quarter note between C-sharp and
D that appears in the bass trombone toward the end of Hyperprism (m. 68). It acts

45 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 478.

46 The modulo operation �nds the remainder of a division of two numbers. In common equal-
tempered pitch space, the number twelve (the octave) functions as a modulo that establishes a
repetitive pattern of equal pitch classes.
47 Varèse and Chou, “The Liberation of Sound,” 11.
48 Examples include the clarinet line in Intégrales (1924–25), the oboe opening in Octandre (1923),
the trumpet melody in O�randes (1921), the �ute beginning in Ameriques (1918–21).
49 Varèse and Chou, “The Liberation of Sound,” 15.
50 While the use of continuous structures, such as glissandi or hyperbolic parabolas, is often asso-
ciated with the work of Iannis Xenakis, whose compositional thought is generally much more
in�uenced by discrete structures, such as set theory, game theory, Markov chains, cellular au-
tomata, combinatorial mathematics, and sieves. Xenakis said of Varèse that “for some reason he
didn’t apply discontinuity. I don’t know why—perhaps he simply didn’t think of it.” See Bálint
András Varga, Conversations with Iannis Xenakis (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), 56.

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The Virtuality of the Compositional Model: Varèse with Deleuze 277

as what Deleuze called a “line of �ight,” a �eeting vanishing point that leads toward
the intensive depth of non-metric space. The line of �ight cannot be grasped by a
signifying regime, it forms a border or in-betweenness that destabilizes the regime
from the inside. The quarter tone in Hyperprism, which is otherwise written en-
tirely within the usual chromatic scale, points toward a virtuality outside of what is
represented with notation.
Besides pitch space, the spatiality of Varèse’s compositional thought also com-
prises a connected idea of “musical objects,” such as masses and planes moving
in a (virtual or actual) space, colliding, penetrating, repelling, or attracting each
other. Heterogeneous musical activities exist next to each other creating more or
less isolated territories. Employing a proto-Deleuzean terminology, Varése terms
these “Zones of Intensities.”51 These zones create a dynamic musical cartography
of timbres and rhythms, allowing for interactions, projections, and transmutations
of territories. Thinking musical processes, together with their locality in a multi-
dimensional space, render possible the simultaneity of isolated elements, or what
Varèse terms their “non-blending.”52 Space is thus not primarily thought of as an
all-encompassing order in which an absolute position can be assigned to every el-
ement. What is primary is not measurable homogeneity, rather pure di�erence or
heterogeneity. Similarly, equidistant metric pulse is not the foundation for rhythm
according to Varèse:
Rhythm is too often confused with metrics. Cadence or the regular succession of beats and
accents has little to do with the rhythm of a composition. Rhythm is the element in music
that gives life to the work and holds it together. . . . [R]hythm derives from the simultaneous
interplay of unrelated elements that intervene at calculated, but not regular time lapses.53

A similar idea is expressed by Deleuze and Guattari, who conceive of rhythm as an

in-between. Rhythm is not a relation, but a passage from one “milieu” to another,
based on their di�erence and incommensurability:
It is well known that rhythm is not meter or cadence, even irregular meter or cadence: there
is nothing less rhythmic than a military march. . . . Meter, whether regular or not, assumes
a coded form whose unit of measure may vary, but in a noncommunicating milieu, whereas
rhythm is the Unequal or the Incommensurable that is always undergoing transcoding. Meter
is dogmatic, but rhythm is critical; it ties together critical moments, or ties itself together in
passing from one milieu to another. It does not operate in a homogeneous space-time, but by
heterogeneous blocks.54

Deleuze’s thinking of rhythm as an in-between of “heterogeneous space-times”55

ties in with his critique of representation, which “mediates everything but mobi-

51 Varèse and Chou, “The Liberation of Sound,” 15.

52 Ibid., 12.
53 Ibid., 15 (emphasis added).
54 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 313.
55 Ibid.

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278 Luc Döbereiner

lizes and moves nothing.”56 The Kantian approach conceives space as a global all-
encompassing container and an a priori condition of possible experience, thereby
stripping space of intensive depth. As Kant lays out in the transcendental aesthetic,
space is not an empirical notion, but rather a necessary representation a priori.
Extension remains “if I take away from our representation of a body all that the
understanding thinks as belonging to it,” and space is therefore thought of “with-
out any real object of the senses.”57 With space as pure representational form,
“[r]epresentation orders space by distributing a fog of extensity over the swarm of
di�erences that . . . constitute the genetic element of space.”58 Transforming Kant’s
conception of space, Deleuze aims to restore di�erence to space by focusing on the
singularity of sensation, on this sensation restituting the intensity covered over by
extension. Smooth space, which is de�ned by not having “a dimension higher than
that which moves through it or is inscribed in it,”59 is thus a concept of space as the
conditions of real and not of possible experience, which is inseparable from what
“�lls” it. In Varèse’s music, the moving and colliding planes and masses do not exist
in a homogeneous space with a supplementary dimension. Such space is created
by the movement of the masses themselves. Like rhythm, which is based on the
unrelated and incommensurable, musical space is founded on disparity, that is, on
intensive di�erence, and it cannot be subtracted from any “real object of the senses,”
in the compositional thought of Varèse, who once called himself, “not a musician,
but a worker in frequencies and intensities.”60

The Reality of the Virtual

The distinction between intensive and extensive space rests on what is perhaps the
most fundamental distinction in Deleuze’s philosophy: the distinction between the
actual and the virtual. Deleuze’s concept of the virtual has nothing to do with the
idea of a simulation of realty, nor does it denote virtual reality; rather, it is the reality
of the virtual. The virtual refers to the ontological status of certain ideal singularities
that structure spaces of possibilities, systems, and processes. Manuel DeLanda uses
the example of the scienti�c concept of an attractor from physics and biology to
expound upon Deleuze’s virtual. Attractors are points or static, periodic, and even
chaotic states of a dynamical system that certain variables tend to approach asymp-
totically even if they never completely reach it. These states determine the evolution
and “stable state” of the process and thus “possess a certain objective e�cacy even
while not being fully actual, since they guide real processes towards a de�nite out-

56 Deleuze, Di�erence and Repetition, 56.

57 Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 70, KrV B 35/A 21.
58 Gregory Flaxman, “Transcendental Aesthetics: Deleuze’s Philosophy of Space,” in Deleuze and
Space, ed. Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 182.
59 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 488.
60 Varèse and Alcopley, “Edgard Varèse on Music and Art,” 194.

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The Virtuality of the Compositional Model: Varèse with Deleuze 279

come prior to the latter’s actualization.”61 Attractors are thus absent, not themselves
perceptible, but fully real. Deleuze emphasizes that the virtual is not to be confused
with the possible,62 for the possible is opposed to the real and possibilities are “real-
ized,” while the virtual is itself real: “The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the
actual. The virtual is fully real in so far as it is virtual.”63 The possible is based on
identity and its realization is always a resemblance, while the virtual is immanent
to the real. A virtual attractor is not “realized” but actualized in a process of genuine
creation guided, constrained, and determined by virtual principles.64 The virtual is
not the possible or potentiality, but rather the structure of the space of possibilities.
The reality of the virtual consists of the di�erential elements and relations along with the
singular points which correspond to them. The reality of the virtual is structure. We must
avoid giving the elements and relations which form a structure an actuality which they do not
have, and withdrawing from them a reality which they have.65

While creatures, which can be sensed, touched, perceived, and so on, are actual
and di�erentiated, the virtual is rather the creating or the instances and events of
creation themselves. Creation is di�erentiation, that is, “the movement of a virtu-
ality actualizing itself,”66 it is what accounts for individuation and the movement
of creative determination. The virtual and the actual exist immanently and in com-
bination, but while the actual is present and measurable, the virtual is real yet not
present. The virtual, therefore, does not exist apart from the actual, but rather is the
process of actualization. Drawing on Henri Bergson, Deleuze associates the virtual
with the continuous whole of the pure past, a past that has never been present, in
contrast to the present actual, which are ephemeral states of a�airs. The virtual is not
a transcendent principle acting upon the present actual, but the new, self-di�ering,
transforming force giving rise to the di�erentiated actual. The present actual is “only
the maximal contraction of all this past which coexists with it.”67 The continuous
and undi�erentiated virtual is also what characterizes Deleuze’s concept of the Idea,
which contains “all the varieties of di�erential relations.”68 The Idea is what virtu-
ally uni�es di�erentiated actual situations. The Idea of sound, for example, is white
noise.

61 Manuel DeLanda, “Space: Extensive and Intensive, Actual and Virtual,” in Buchanan and Lambert,
Deleuze and Space, 83.
62 Deleuze draws heavily on Bergson’s critique of the category of the possible, which, for Bergson,
is a “mirage of the present in the past,” a retrospective construction that reduces creative novelty
by appearing as preceding its realization. One rather has to state that “it is the real which makes
itself possible, and not the possible which becomes real” (Henri Bergson, Key Writings, ed. Keith
Ansell Pearson and John Mullarkey [London: Continuum, 2002], 232).
63 Deleuze, Di�erence and Repetition, 208.
64 Ibid., 212.
65 Ibid., 209.
66 Ibid., 40.
67 Ibid., 82.
68 Ibid., 207.

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280 Luc Döbereiner

Deleuze repeatedly describes the virtual with a quote by Marcel Proust: “Real
without being actual, ideal without being abstract.” In its original context, this
phrase, which appears in Time Regained, the �nal volume of In Search of Lost Time,
describes the status of a sound: “But let a noise, or scent, once heard or smelt, be
heard or smelt again in the present and at the same time in the past, real without
being actual, ideal without being abstract, and immediately . . . the essence of things
is liberated.”69 A noise is thus both present and past. Similarly, for Deleuze every
object is split into two halves, “one being a virtual image and the other an actual
image,”70 that is, one present and one past. In sound we thus have, on the one hand,
the connection to the past through its status of always already being a resounding
resonance and its virtual structure, the noise out of which it ideally emerges through
self-di�erentiation, and, on the other hand, we have the di�erentiated, measurable,
and determined actual yet ephemeral created sound, the concrete lived sensation.
The distinction between the actual and the virtual also crucially determines the
way that science, art, and philosophy operate according to Deleuze. Science deals
with the description of actualization, it studies processes of di�erentiation and cap-
tures these in scienti�c “functions.” It thereby “continually actualizes the event in
a state of a�airs, thing, or body that can be referred to.”71 Art and philosophy both
work in the opposite direction. While science’s domain is the actual, art and phi-
losophy strive for a counter-actualization, a wresting of the virtual from the actual
by way of creating sensations and concepts. For Deleuze, science is concerned with
measurable creatures, it tries to slow down every process and limit the chaotic vir-
tuality, thereby “relinquishing the in�nite.”72 In contrast, art and philosophy are
directed away from the actual creature or created and toward the virtual creation,
restoring the in�nite and passing through to the virtual creative Ideas and forces
determining actual states and situations. Art has an actual materiality, but it oper-
ates “like a passage from the �nite to the in�nite”73 by wresting from the personal,
actual, and ephemeral a�ections and perceptions the impersonal and lasting a�ects
and percepts. It liberates a virtual, in�nite creative potential within matter and “does
not actualize the virtual event but incorporates or embodies it.”74 Percepts, a�ects,
and sensations are no longer tied to humans and their experience, rather they exist
in themselves and “in the absence of man.”75 The work of art is thus neither �gu-
rative nor metaphorical, but a pure being (or “bloc”) of sensation. The work of art
preserves impersonal percepts and a�ects, which it extracts from the state of the
perceiving subject. The extraction of percepts and a�ects is also a disengagement

69 Marcel Proust, Time Regained, trans. Andreas Mayor and Terence Kilmartin (London: Vintage 2000,
1996), 224.
70 Deleuze, Di�erence and Repetition, 209.
71 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, 126.
72 Ibid., 118.
73 Ibid., 180.
74 Ibid., 174.
75 Ibid., 164.

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The Virtuality of the Compositional Model: Varèse with Deleuze 281

from human perception and habitual di�erences. The author creates a syntax that
“makes the standard language stammer, tremble, cry, or even sing. . . . The writer
twists language.”76 Deleuze and Guattari do not refer to a preservation of a past per-
ception, and reject an idea of art, which has its source in the rich experiences of an
artist, in his or her adventures or encounters. Instead, they describe the composition
of autonomous beings of sensation, which exceed the lived: “A�ects are precisely
these nonhuman becomings of man, just as percepts . . . are nonhuman landscapes
of nature.”77 Reading Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, Deleuze and Guattari see the
construction of an ocean percept, that is, not the perception of the ocean, rather the
ocean as percept. This is indeed presented as the perception of Ahab, but only under
the condition of his becoming nonhuman, his becoming-whale. Moby Dick, creates
the percept ocean and extracts the a�ect of becoming-whale, which is understood
not as the regression to a lower bestiality nor as imitation, but as a dissolving of es-
tablished di�erences, a continuous becoming-other. In its connection to experience,
art tries to let a moment in the world exist on its own, to make it into a “monument.”
For Deleuze, Francis Bacon’s paintings, for example, do not depict the perception of
horror, but the percept of horror itself. Art is always a becoming and lets its ob-
servers, listeners, or readers become with it, which is why “sensory becoming is
otherness caught in a matter of expression”:78 Kafka’s becoming-beast, Van Gogh’s
becoming-sun�ower, or Messiaen’s impersonal becomings through “melodic land-
scapes” and “rhythmic characters” (and a becoming-bird).

Rendering Inaudible Forces Audible

For Deleuze, what art deals with, its problem, is not the creation of forms, but “cap-
turing forces.”79 For a sensation to be there, a force needs to be exerted on a body.
The force, however, is not given or sensed itself, rather it remains virtual, and it is
the task of art to render these imperceptible forces perceptible: “music must render
nonsonorous forces sonorous, and painting must render invisible forces visible.”80
Music is therefore always a soni�cation of inaudible forces and a fortiori twentieth-
century music, which molecularizes sound matter and captures forces, such as den-
sity, attraction, gravitation, pressure, and time itself. Varèse describes his music
generally as a structure that “is expanded and split into di�erent shapes or groups
of sounds that constantly change in shape, direction, and speed, attracted and re-
pulsed by various forces.”81 Modern music deals with “a direct relation material-

76 Ibid., 176.
77 Ibid., 169.
78 Ibid., 177.
79 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (London: Continuum,
2005), 40.
80 Ibid.
81 Varèse and Alcopley, “Edgard Varèse on Music and Art,” 191.

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282 Luc Döbereiner

forces”82 and no longer primarily with the question of matter-form relations.

Varèse’s “liberation of sound” is precisely this turn towards material forces:
Varese’s procedure, at the dawn of this age, is exemplary: a musical machine of consistency,
a sound machine (not a machine for reproducing sounds), which molecularizes and atomizes,
ionizes sound matter, and harnesses a cosmic energy.83

Varèse is no longer concerned with variation and musical forms that are handed-
down, but rather those that dissolve and molecularize form. The atomized sound
matter is simultaneously a dematerialization. With a surprising, implicit reference
to the Hegelian system of the arts, Deleuze argues that music begins where painting
ends, for “it gives a disembodied and dematerialized body to the most spiritual of
entities.”84 Varèse’s teacher, Busoni, spoke similarly of an “untrammeled immaterial-
ity” of music and argued for a rede�nition of absolute music in opposition to Eduard
Hanslick’s famous de�nition of music as “sonically moving forms” (tönend bewegte
Formen).85 For Busoni, painting is still tied to representation, while music freed from
the constraints of form no longer “describes,” but directly expresses material forces
or what Busoni terms “processes in Nature”:
“Absolute music” is a form-play without poetic program, in which the form is intended to
have the leading part. But Form, in itself, is the opposite pole of absolute music, on which was
bestowed the divine prerogative of buoyancy, of freedom from the limitations of matter. In
a picture, the illustration of a sunset ends with the frame; the limitless natural phenomenon
is enclosed in quadrilateral bounds; the cloud-form chosen for depiction remains unchanging
for ever. Music can grow brighter or darker, shift hither or yon, and �nally fade away like the
sunset glow itself.86

Instead of variation, Varèse speaks of “transmutation” of sound masses. These

masses move, contract, expand, and collide in space and time. Varèse’s variational
transmutation is no longer working with a thematic musical object, but rather with
virtual �gures and planes in motion. Form is no longer architectonic, there is no
atemporal sca�olding, but rather a continuously �owing transformation, which is
why everything always emerges out of what has preceded it. Form is no longer ap-
plied to matter as in the hylomorphic model, but matter is itself conceived in motion.
Rhythmic cells, for example, are in a constant state of mutation, they are the pro-
cess of mutation itself. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari dwell on the
example of metallurgy, which they argue goes beyond the hylomorphic model of
actively imposing form on passive matter and rather uncovers an intermediate be-
tween the sensible and the intelligible. In metallurgy, matter is itself the process of

82 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 342.

83 Ibid., 343.
84 Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 39.
85 Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen: Ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst
(Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1910), 59.
86 Busoni, Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music, 5–6.

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The Virtuality of the Compositional Model: Varèse with Deleuze 283

a forming and is continuously shaped and qualitatively transformed, which is why

“metallurgy has an essential relation with music,” because both engender “beyond
separate forms, a continuous development of form, and beyond variable matters, a
continuous variation of matter.”87 Transformation or transmutation, therefore, can-
not be contained in the concept of form, and energetic materiality cannot be con-
tained in a passive concept of material: “In short, what metal and metallurgy bring
to light is a life proper to matter, a vital state of matter as such, a material vitalism.”88
In a lecture given on 2 February 1979,89 Deleuze expounds upon the connection be-
tween metallurgy and music. He detects a number of “lines” in music that intersect,
merge, disappear, and reappear in its history, such as the “wood line” and the “vocal
line.” Deleuze states that with Wagner and Berlioz the brass instruments gain impor-
tance, and a “metallic line” develops that is at the root of electronic music. Varèse,
he argues, stands at a crossroad of the metallic line and the crystalline line:
At the same time, he [Varèse] invokes notions like those of prisms, metallic sonorities, which
open out into electronic music. Just as the crystalline line passes by way of a rather complex
conception of prisms, the metallic line passes by way of a rather complex conception of “ion-
ization,” and all that will get entangled and it will be like the genealogical lines of an electronic
music.90

Deleuze emphasizes that the metallic and crystalline lines are not to be understood
as metaphors, but the crystal is rather “an active operator” (le cristal est un opérateur
actif ) in the compositional technique and in the conception of music. An ostensi-
ble example of metallization can be found in the measures 51 to 55 of Ionisation
(1929–31), which consists of an all-metal sonority and sirens playing a transformed
and “metallized” version of the beginning of the piece.91 Another example of “met-
allization” can be recognized in Varèse’s use the piano in the composition Déserts
(1950–54). As Helga de la Motte-Haber has observed,92 the piano, which is played
without a lid, is largely used as a resonance instrument reproducing the sound of
the whole or parts of the ensemble. In so doing, it establishes a close relation to the
electronic interpolations in that it functions like a loudspeaker. The piano, moreover,

87 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 411.

88 Ibid. (emphasis added).
89 Gilles Deleuze, “Cours vincennes – 27/02/1979: Metal, metallurgie, musique, husserl, simondon,”
accessed 1 October 2014, http://webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=185&groupe=Anti+Oedipe+et
+Mille+Plateaux&langue=1.
90 “[I]l [Varèse] invoque à la fois des notions comme celles de prismes, de sonorités métalliques, et
qui débouche sur la musique électronique. Tout comme la ligne cristalline passe par toute une con-
ception assez complexe des prismes, la ligne métallique va passer par toute une conception assez
complexe de la ‘ionisation,’ et tout ça va s’enchevêtrer et ça va être comme des lignes généalogiques
d’une musique électronique” (ibid.; my translation).
91 For a detailed analysis of the work see Chou Wen-chung, “Ionisation: The Function of Timbre in
Its Formal and Temporal Organization,” in The New Worlds of Edgard Varèse: A Symposium, ed.
Sherman Van Solkema (New York: Institute for Studies in American Music, Brooklyn College of
the City University of New York, 1979), 27–74.
92 De la Motte-Haber, Die Musik von Edgard Varèse, 43.

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284 Luc Döbereiner

often reproduces the material of the brasses and the metal percussion instruments,
thereby mediating between the two and operating as a metallized ampli�cation.
The work Intégrales (1924) is concerned with what Varèse terms “projection,” by
which he means both the physical projection of sound into space and a composi-
tional technique, which he describes as “the changing projection of a geometrical
�gure onto a plane surface . . . moving in space.”93 The status of these planes and
�gures is virtual; they are non-present yet real in their creative determination of the
actual. Varèse’s space is virtual, whereas it is the undi�erentiated intensive spatium
that is sonically actualized. Varèse’s music, however, makes this imperceptible space
and force audible. Deleuze’s concept of the virtual draws, among other things, on dif-
ferential calculus. He distinguishes between two operations: di�erenciation, which
is the actualization of the content of an idea, or the solution of a problem, and dif-
ferentiation, which is a virtualization or “the determination of the virtual content
of an Idea.”94 If a particular process is modeled, one can record the trajectories of
certain variables and through repeated application of the (mathematical) operation
of di�erentiation one can obtain a vector �eld which “captures the inherent tenden-
cies”95 of the trajectories of the system.
Applying the (mathematical) operation of integration, which “forms an original
process of di�erenciation,”96 recreates actual trajectories. Intégrales—the title refers
to integral calculus—can thus be said to constitute a di�erenciation, a creative actu-
alization of the virtual and ideal compositional space of planes of �gures. In Varèse’s
music, however, the virtual compositional space and the actual musical present are
in continuous exchange. The process of compositional crystallization that Varèse
describes is a contraction of virtual and actual. Singular creative individuation and
determine actual identities in experience become indistinguishable, and, as Deleuze
writes in one of his �nal texts, “exchange during crystallization to the extent that
they become indiscernible, each relating to the role of the other.”97
For Deleuze, virtuality is pure creation and the principle of creation is a nonhu-
man and inorganic life. Beneath every individual actual life form or organism, there
is an undi�erentiated multiplicity of virtual life.98 Art as an intensi�cation of life

93 John Strawn, “The Intégrales of Edgard Varèse: Space, Mass, Element, and Form,” Perspectives of
New Music 17, no. 1 (1978): 139.
94 Deleuze, Di�erence and Repetition, 207.
95 DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, 28–29.
96 Deleuze, Di�erence and Repetition, 209.
97 Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 151.
98 Deleuze is heavily in�uenced by Bergson, and his reading of Bergson is often indistinguishable
from his own philosophy. On Bergson’s élan vital, Deleuze writes: “It is always the case of a virtu-
ality in the process of being actualized, a simplicity in the process of di�erentiating, a totality in the
process of dividing up: Proceeding by dissociation and division,” by ‘dichotomy,’ is the essence of
Life.” See Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York:
Zone Books, 1991), 94.

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The Virtuality of the Compositional Model: Varèse with Deleuze 285

restores this nonorganic life beyond actuality, since “the power of nonorganic life
. . . can be found in a line that’s drawn, a line of writing, a line of music. . . . Any
work of art points a way through for life, �nds a way through the cracks.”99 Art is
hence tapping the creative forces of nonorganic intensive life, which it wrests from
its material in order to “free life from where it’s trapped.”100 For Deleuze, there is no
ontological distinction between life and matter, and it is ultimately this materialist
vitalism that he shares with Varèse, for the “continual process of expansion, interac-
tion, penetration, transmutation” in his music originates in his concept of “sound as
living matter.”101 Writing about his early orchestra piece Bourgogne, Varèse claimed
that he “was trying to approximate a kind of inner microscopic life you �nd in cer-
tain chemical solutions, or through the �ltering of light.”102 Writing about the rhyth-
mic and timbral complexity of the work Ionisation, the critic Paul Rosenfeld saw an
articulation of “the life of the inanimate universe.”103
Varèse frequently alluded to a de�nition of music by the Polish-French philoso-
pher Hoëné Wronski: music is “the corporealization of the intelligence that is in
sound.”104 Varèse defended this de�nition because, as he claimed, it makes no use
of “such subjective terms as beauty, feeling, etc.”105 He encountered Wronski’s ideas
in Camille Durettes mathematically informed theory of harmony. In contrast to
Varèse’s interpretation, however, Wronski actually writes, in the very context to
which Varèse refers, not only that “music belongs to the systems of realities that de-
pend on feeling” (“la musique appartient aux systèmes de réalités qui dépendent du
sentiment”), but also that it possesses a “subjective purpose constituting the beau-
tiful” (“la �nalité subjective de la création constituant le beau”). Most strikingly,
however, Varèse changed Wronski’s de�nition,106 which originally reads “corpore-
alization of the intelligence in (or into) sound” (“la corpori�cation de l’intelligence
dans les sons”).107 Whereas, for Wronski intelligence or spirit becomes embodied in
sound, Varèse speaks of “the intelligence that is in sound,” and he thereby attributes
intelligence to living sonorous materiality itself.

99 Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995),
143.
100 Ibid., 141.
101 Chou Wen-chung, “Varèse: A Sketch of the Man and his Music,” The Musical Quarterly 52, no. 2
(1966): 161.
102 John. D. Anderson, “Varèse and the Lyricism of the New Physics,” The Musical Quarterly 75, no. 1
(1991): 37.
103 Odile Vivier, Varèse (Paris: Seuil, 1973), 100.
104 Varèse and Chou, “The Liberation of Sound,” 17.
105 Ibid.
106 Anne Parks has noted Varèse’s reinterpretation of Wronski’s phrase. See Anderson, “Varèse and
the Lyricism of the New Physics,” 33.
107 Camille Durutte, Ésthetique musicale: Technie ou lois générales du système harmonique (Paris:
Mallet-Bachelier, 1855), vii.