1

Cosmos, Rhythm and Plane (Approach to Sonorous Production)

Richard Pinhas

Only now has it dawned on humanity that music is a

figurative language of the passions: and later we will
learn how to recognise clearly the impulsive system of a
musician through his music. In truth, he did not intend
to betray himself in this manner.1

That music is the figurative language [le langage figur] of the passions, that it
implies the discernment of the whole set of instincts: this is what Nietzsche affirms of
a musician, and he means to extend it, without doubt, to all possible music.
Sonorous production evokes a singular kind of instinct: a relation of forces that can in
principle be quantified and qualified. These are quantities of energy (quanta) and
qualities-powers (affects). A musical work is a precipitate of determinate quantities
of energy and expresses determinate powers of being affected. For example: metal
music, becoming-water [le devenir eau], the crystal with the glass-harmonica of
Mozart.2 These involve real syntheses, whether they be analogical or digital, of forces
determining singular states, configurations unique to singular moments, like
instantaneous cuts in Time (see Deleuze, The Time-Image).
In the continuum of the plane of composition, this instantaneous cut determining the
objective state of sonorous forces, of actual multiplicities, is also a punctual

1 [Nietzsche, Smtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), Vol. 11,
pp. 518-19, 35 [24], May-July 1885; cited in Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle
[1969], trans. D. W. Smith (London: Continuum, 1997), pp. 2-3].
2 Metal: cf. the brass in Wagner, but also Fripp and Eno, Index of Metal, EG Records. Water: Debussy,
La mer, the Aquae of Edgar Froese. The syntheses: Kraftwerk or indeed Heldon, but also contemporary
intelligent Techno (or metatechno): Chemical Brothers, Scanner, Aphex Twin.

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description of affects, of affective complexes expressed by the play of these powers.
This datable configuration of forces is the composition of the work in the organic
body of the supposed musician (the agent or suppt).3 In its violence to individuated
bodies, the sonorous body puts music itself into question.
Instinct is an Encounter, the punctuation of a fulguration, or, from the contrary
perspective, a fixed state within which quantitative and qualititative multiplicities
(objective states of forces) seem to be unable to evolve further.4
Like a photo in the real world, this instantaneous cut is a fiction, like the fiction of the
Intellect5: we think we can seize and interpret the regimes of signs and forms which
constitute temporal reality, and date it precisely. But that would be a pure commodity.
***

Nietzsche often makes reference to this notion of fixity: forces become static, figured,
fixed6, enter a declination. This is a strategic relationship: he underlines the positions
of the implex of forces which, in the vital continuum of the plane, initialise and
densify the process of expression. This procedure is equally known as Composition.
The elementary forms of sonorous production, what constitutes the internal necessity
of the work, are what is a priori transparently visible and communicable in this
fixed state of forces. The necessity is strictly internal: it is Rhythm (the Unequal, in

3 [Cf. Daniel W. Smiths long informative note about the French term suppt in his introduction to his
translation of Klossowskis Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle: We have translated the unusual but
important term suppt as agent. The word is derived from the Latin suppositum, that which is placed
under. In contemporary usage, it refers to a subordinate who acts on behalf of someone else, such as a
secret agent, and usually implies that the subordinate is carrying out the designs of a wicked superior
(xii).]
4 On the suppt and instinct, see Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle. On the notion of
encounter, see also Fripp as much as Deleuze.
5 [Cf. Bergsons notion of intellect in Creative Evolution, chapter III (trans. A. Mitchell, Lanham:
University Press of America, 1983 [1911], pp. 186-220].
6 The Gay Science Posthumous Fragments, MIII-1.

3
Deleuzes terms), disengaged and complex pressure, that brings about the symbiosis
of music with the elements. Rhythm, or the Unequal, renders vibrations sensible.7
The movement is a spanning out [balayage], operated within duration through a
condensation, of elementary forms (simple or already composed, complex sequences).
This movement is, by definition, the circulation of densities in the sonorous
continuum (operative nuclei, analogical modulators, syntheses of tessiturae, numerical
manipulators of time and data, etc.)
Submitted to rhythm, movement gives birth to the oscillatory principle of the
plane of musical composition. In the complex world of abstract sonorous forces,
continuous Movement (or Variation) which Bergson got close to defining with his
concept of duration as indivisible continuity of movement is left to unfold itself.
Rhythm in the fundamental oscillation which determines the duration of a music, its
pure heterogeneity. Rhythm is the exact contrary of metrics, of the homogeneous.
In the Temporality of the world, it is the real distributor: rhythm is the Unequal
that is immanent to the plane of sonorous composition. It is the development of an
active principle of movement, and it literally composes the plane of effectuation of
sonorous beings. Pure and strict ontological unity.

***

Will it be one day necessary to formalise the relations between Time and Silence,
music and the cosmos, the constitution and efficacity of singular musical Ideas, the
sinuous yet stellar relations of a Theory of the Heavens with the creation of a
sonorous transhistorical continuum? A question posed by Nietzsche, to which
musicians and nomads are beholden for a reply.
7 Farrachi, La Part du silence; Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.

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At its limit point, the little refrain [la petite ritournelle] no doubt implies a
Music of the Spheres. A single cosmos, a single and unique Plane, perhaps even a
single refrain, renewed without cease, a musical expression of the Eternal Return.
Rhythm is essentially Ontological, and the whole history of music can from a certain
perspective be seen as a plea for a true Ontology of the Unequal.
Constituting and non-constituted, Rhythm and connected durations (or
simultaneous temporalities) are the genetic principles of the musical abstract machine:
they engender diagrams of concrete effectuations, making the sonorous continuum
audible here and now. The expressive positions of the relations of force are punctual
densities. Certain statements can be formulated for their performance and for the
preservation of these relations. These statements, the modulators and tensors of
language, are themselves the supports and vehicle of instinctive expressions. They
articulate the always actual presence of sounds. In the same way, it is the inscription
of the partition, in its singular temporality, that is imprinted upon the Idea of
composition, and allows it to realise its presentation. In a differential time, and by
nature incomparable, the instruments of the orchestra denominated as classical,
alongside the metallic guitars of thrash, the electronic, cybertechnoid machine, all
proceed towards the same actualisation. They are objective concretions, or the real
syntheses of effectuation.
By nature, the Time of the writing of the composition is suspended,
immaterial. It is in direct contact with the contraction and expansion of the passions.
Depositary of a special logic, embodied in relations of forces, it is their figural
language. Intimate to the passions, this semiotic language proceeds by direct signs: it
presents itself as in an immediate relation of adequation with sonorous matter, an
instantaneous translation, but still a translation. It has formal modalities of execution,

5
and different modes of articulation proper to a system of language. But it proceeds by
direct signs, sonorous images, figures of expression, icons; it is a semiotic modulatory
language resonating with synthetic continuous modulation: a type of inscription in
real diagrams, an asignifying semiotic, and one that is a long way off from the
pleasant fantasy of the language of passions conjured up by Rousseau. It is grafted
onto the system of interpretation of the instincts, as a privileged transductor. When
Wagnerian motifs are contracted, and the expressed content incarnates the continuity
of differential relations, or the virtual unconscious idea (Deleuze, Difference and
Repetition) of the infinite melody, then expressivity, or the power of movement, can
attain in strategic regimes a degree of consistency that is proper to figures of
expression. Henceforth, these figures are able to disengage expressed contents which
together form the true content of music itself: metal-affects, the crystal of the glassharmonica, the organic oscillation of magnetic delay, the cold numericisation of
numerical delays, the mythology of the Grail, even just complex repetition itself, etc.
The task is to make an account of the Formative elements, of the treatments of
materials, of the diverse syntheses, of the organisation in segments or in aggregates,
sequences and motifs, of the degree of concrete effectuation and of their objective,
pragmatic conditions: the powers, the modes and the qualities of statements-affects.
Expressivity is here finally raised to the level of the diagram, with rhythm as the
active and absolute principle. Music is a cosmic becoming [devenir]. The plane.

***

Let us listen to La mer. What affection, what figurative language of the passions,
which sensations does it express? It seems to enter into an empathetic and directly

6
material relationship with its acoustic elements. We hear the surf, but even more the
vital connection to liquid molecules and to fluidity. A continuous symbiosis of
sonorous materials and marine elements pushed to a higher, non-organic, power
emanates out of its composition. Notes and timbres, harmonies, identify themselves,
taking on the guise of sonorous Nature, of molecules of water. In a living rapport,
music takes charge of the expression and the supersensible potential of the Sea. The
sonorous composition is the vehicle of the powers and affects of water: it makes
marine time audible in its idiosyncrasy. And marine Time in turn becomes a sonorous
Idea.
This metamorphosis of musical beings is indeed down to the forces of the
composer: we can observe Richard Wagner constructing the continuous melody in
which love-passion and suffering are expressed in the grandeur of motifs in a time of
simultaneous compossibility. It is through the same procedure that Jimi Hendrix
discharges the shame of the American nation following the Vietnam war (and its great
health following the destitution of Nixon), when he emits showers of slow-motion
flaming napalm and gyring shafts of harmony, out of phase and suspended, on a
marvellous guitar transmuted into a celestial element. As if he has become pure
Doppler effect, Hendrix sends our self spinning out of phase, to the profit of a
virtually infinite collection of fluctuating and metamorphic identities. These are
sublime and terrestrial expressions of the Will to Power. The good organisation of
form and the structural unity of the work, the supposed matrix of the narrative (cf.
Lyotard, Discours, figure), all disappear to the profit of a new distribution of materials
and tessiturae, and of a magnificent dispersion of sonorous aggregates: the breathing
[souffle] of the formative elements that are proper to musical being.

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Music puts sound material into continuous variation. It is the apology of the
molecular continuum, and as such it recovers the primordial meaning of cosmic,
transfinite powers: the noise of the depths of the universe, and of chaotic, unlimited
expansion, of matter, materials and becomings (see Deleuze-Guattari, Of the
Refrain, in A Thousand Plateaus). A test of resonances and percussions, music
presents itself through Unequal movement in the real, in connected and simultaneous
durations, but above all as an a priori Temporal synthesiser.
La mer, an acoustic series of metamorphoses, an emission of aquatic affects.
Other examples: Kraftwerk: analogical man in his machinic becoming, a melange of
cables and data, on his path to a grandiose metamorphosis in the universe of numbers.
Brian Eno and his imperceptible becomings, his properly atmospheric music, with its
oblique strategies.

***

We have to try to understand the syntheses proper to the complex composition of a

musical landscape, syntheses that exceed the usual academic, lyrical and figurative
forms. It is in musical art as a whole that, by virtue of its interior power, we attain the
life of the elemental: the songs of the Earth, the sublimity of mountain heights,
weather music, the tellurian lan of little differences and of terrible Repetition (Philip
Glass). Music should also be understood as a final contraction, one that at last renders
the density of the sky audible, giving expression to the differences in which a
freedom for the end of the world becomes possible, a forced movement towards an
unsayable universe (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition).

8
Deleuze knew how to articulate the convergence of history and music towards
a common limit: the making sonorous of the cosmos, and the confounding of the
organism through sonorous and luminous powers. One imagines the intense and
repeated usage of a non-figurative material, precipitating the mobile constellations of
forms and contents. Proust as musician, the sonata of Vinteuil; or even Baudelaire,
when he describes the movement of the soul of a continuous melody in the sublime
and celestial whiteout of Wagnerian musical drama. The analogical repetitive cells
and molecular sequences of Fripp and Eno (Riley, Heldon, Reich).
If music is indeed the figurative language of the passions, the figuration
should not be conceived as an interpretative register of impulsive signs, nor as some
sort of faithful representation of waves of intensity. It takes place on a different level,
in the passage from sense to representation, where there is a limiting silence (Farrachi,
Blanchot). There is no signifier that can give us an evaluation of the sonorous passion.
Speaking in the manner of Freud, one has to imagine a radical barrier between the
flux of the primary process and the secondary order that is inhabited by words. From
one sphere to the other, the only interpretative path is the production of Figures, of
compositions: sensible expressions of forces working upon and in the work. For
Nietzsche, figuring, in the sense of the Will to Power, is different to expressing.
Expression is a power, a strategic regime, an operative concrete mode, an aristocratic
type of regime. Figuration (the figural in Jean-Franois Lyotards sense) is an
elaboration, a transformative work of energies through which the circulation of
metamorphoses provokes the Transvaluation that is bound up with becoming. If
figuration is a level of the synthesis of composition, the figurative is to figuration
what sentiment is to the sensation. Devaluation, reactivity, and the nihilistic collapse

9
of the ego into itself. Figuration is a power of expression, but the figurative, on the
contrary, leads straight into the regime of representation.
The process of sonorous production puts into action at least three sorts of
temporality, which can succeed or enter into a simultaneous interweaving with each
other. These types do not define the qualities of Duration proper to the work, but
rather delimit the diverse times of the composition in its concrete effectuation. There
exists an Integral Present of the organisation of musical beings, which depends
directly on the Presence of sonorous forces, on dynamics, accents and densities: the a
priori presence of Rhythm and the continuity of movement. In this case, the Time of
simultaneities where such a time exists is always ontologically bound to definite
rhythms, as an empirico-transcendental complex. The Unequal is the great integrator,
the principle of distributions and of movement.8
Inserted into the Time of reproduction, music becomes audible. The movement of its
execution is contemporary with the process of hearing it, so it implies a certain
subjectivity. Bound to the forms and variations of perception, it delimits a living
time which is actualised in the subjective durations proper to the Logic of
Sensations (Deleuze).
Music that has been reified through a written score exists eternally (an eternal
object in Whiteheads sense); but it can also remain in this inaudible state. Whence its
literally infinite character: its incorporeal sounds, beyond milieu, beyond even the
vibrations of air. There is a kind of a temporality in parentheses, a sort of objective
Time in which music implicates itself in compact and virtual forces, always endowed
with possible actualisations. The time of musical writing differs by nature from
ordinary time because it a Time of production: of diagrams in connection with pure
8 This characteristic of simultaneity posits the synthesis of the Unequal and affirms the presence of
specifically musical time. See Deleuze, Difference and Repetition.

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objectivity (the planes of composition of sonorous syntheses). An illustration of the
sonorous Infinitive: certain letters of Mozart affirm the thought that the surging forth
of musical composition is like the unravelling of a pure Idea: it is as if everything
begins with a dream or contracted point, dense and concrete, requiring only an
unfolding or explication, even an expression, a sort of narration of the sonorous flux.

***

In the contracted time of the condensation of musical Beings, the nuclear Time of
sonorous Ideas, beyond the supposed subjectivity of composers, the only thing that
counts are densities of duration and the inclusive inflexions that are made of the
realised suprasensible horizon. Simultaneity of Wagnerian motifs, differential
repetitions of organo-metallic syntheses in Robert Fripp, the great analogy of simple
rhythms in Kraftwerk: an array of multiplicities each leading to the sublime and to the
absolute. It is the absolute density of the work, of Rhythm, insofar as it is the
Inequal, that grounds the great sonorous abstract machine. It is a passage through
milieux and it creates consistency; it distributes acoustic tensors or electronic tropes
(electrotropes), deploying modules of variation. Perhaps these electrotropes illustrate
the first phases in a genetic sonorous mutation, of which the terminal state would be
schizotropes. Synthetic modulation a priori condenses connected and simultaneous
temporalities and engenders the strategies of the diagram.
Sonorous production is necessarily a kind of essential simplification: flowing
out from the core of forces, showing its structures as it goes, extracting the purest
intensities, making evident the very process of composition (Eno, Boulez, Glass and
Fripp possess this procedure in common). Boulez explains how the diagram simplifies

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movement in the strategic regime of the Overture. It was the new blood of the
barbarians, a kind of electric shock applied without tact to chlorotic organisms. 9 In
algebra, the term simplification is applied when the terms of an equation are reduced
to a more direct expression. In this sense, the Rite may be spoken of as an essential
simplification.10
This procedure of simplification is the innovation necessarily highly performative
that belongs to contemporary music. As soon as the figurative language of the
passions gains a consistency, expression is released on the plane of musical
composition, in diagram and rhythm. In his reflections on rhythm, Boulez inverts the
usual critical perspectives: With Stravinsky, the pre-eminence of rhythm is shown by
the reduction of polyphony and harmony to subordinate functions.11 The concrete
rhythm which fills bodies is at once real empirical sensation, and the major element of
composition: it orders the world of effective syntheses. But this real rhythm itself is
dependent on another plane, the plane of the abstract musical machine, the great
sonorous Rhizosphere. The disjunctive synthesis of simultaneities is carried out on
this immanent plane of unengendered Rhythm.
Let us follow Nietzsche: The concept of revelation in the sense that suddenly, with
indescribable certainty and subtlety, something becomes visible, audible, something
that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down that merely describes the
facts [] One is altogether beside oneself, with the distinct consciousness of a
multiplicity of shudders radiating down to ones toes: a depth of happiness in which
even what is most painful and gloomy does not seem something opposite but rather
9 Prsentation du Sacre du Printemps, CBS Disques. [Translated as Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring
in Pierre Boulez, Orientations, ed. J-J. Nattiez, trans. M. Cooper, London: Faber & Faber, 1986), pp.
362-63. Pinhass French text for the first sentence of the quotation reads chaotic instead of Boulezs
original chlorotique].
10 Ibid, 362 [Translation modified].
11 Ibid, 363.

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conditioned, provoked, a necessary colour in such a superabundance of light; an
instinct for rhythmic relationships that recovers immense extensions of forms
duration, the need for overarching rhythms, this is almost the measure of the power of
inspiration, a kind of compensation for its pressure and tension (Ecce Homo, Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, # 3).12 Speeds and slownesses, relations of movement and rest,
are fundamental to the relations of rhythm. An internal need to amplify rhythm can be
ascribed to forms like durations, in the sense that rhythm, along with style, including
great style, are the fundamental elements to all formation of sovereignty, to all
expression of power, to all possible creation.

***

The rhythm of the work, of the sequence, of the aggregate, even of a unique sound, a
point of singularity or inflexion, is immediately derived from the ontological Rhythm
produced by the abstract sonorous machine. It is for instance only through the
accomplishment of properly diagrammatic procedures that figured or fixed coordinates are definitively eliminated from The Rite. Hence the need to highlight
accentuated modes of rhythm in any analysis of the properties of pulsation (Boulez
again).
The intrinsic consistency and internal density of the work are the concrete
issue of the continuum of compossible sounds, a virtual musical flux that tends
towards the dispersion of events, the distribution of materials and intensities, the
expression and the development of melodies. To form unheard-of acoustic traces, to
express cosmic resonances, to exacerbate the great fundamental pulsation, and finally
to render music nebulous, an audible and sonorous gas: celestial diffraction and
12 [Ecce Homo, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), 300. Translation modified].

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magical breathing. From this moment, musical Beings are taken to be composed of
sonorous Ideas. They become ontological essences upon the plane of sonorous
composition. Modernity perhaps consists in nothing other than this passage from the
structure Complex of Bach to the materials-repetition Implex of our contemporaries.
As with derived rhythms, essential simplification can be applied a priori to
any particular element or form. Take for example The Rhinegold. The long
introduction develops a single double accord, at once a particular kind of tessitura and
a real sketch of a motif. When, in turn, the same labour is applied once more to the
concrete rhythm, it is the pulsation itself that begins to magnify itself (cf. Webern and
absolute necessity). Music then becomes the Time of the world, the virtual Oscillation
of the cosmos, radiating out from the noise of the depths of the universe.

***

Let us recapitulate. In its purest state13, the concrete rhythmic impulsion leads towards
a Rhythm that is differential insofar as it is Unequal. This is a complex Rhythm,
which effectuates disjunctive and affirmative syntheses of simultaneous and
connected durations, and composes the coexistence of all movements and every
compossible sonorous world. Each line of duration corresponds intimately to a
specific sonorous universe, a monad-sound; each rhythm describes a singularity of

13 Boulez: The extreme and most characteristic example of this new state of affairs is furnished by
the Dances of the Young Girls, where one chord contains, literally, the entire invention. Reduced to its
simplest and most summary expression (because a single chord cannot imply any functional
relationship), the harmony serves as material for rhythmical elaboration which is perceived by means
of accents. The orchestration helps us to hear these accents more clearly, by the barking of the horns
above the continuity of the strings. This is how we perceive music so conceived: before worrying about
what chord we are hearing, we are sensitive to the pulse emitted by this chord. Glorification of the
Chosen Victim, or Sacrificial Dance, though they are less simplified moments, impress initially in
the same manner; for, beyond melodic fragments (which repetition allows us to grasp so quickly as to
neutralise them), what we hear is the rhythmic impulse almost in its pure state (Boulez, Stravinsky:
The Rite of Spring, 363).

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plane and the plane of immanence itself becomes confused in its symbiosis with the
Unequal.
A simple musical Being (or sequence) is constituted of microrhythms, and is produced
rhythmically (its being in the world is of a rhythmical nature, an amplified rhythm).
It modulates according to metamorphic processes, or internal rhythmic variations
(pulsation), or again of the type encounters (Fripp and Deleuze make their apologies
because of commitments). The peopling the plane of sonorous composition is carried
out by such modulations.
Behaviour, appearances, and modalities of being all these are essentially
rhythmical. Musical Beings are rhythmical complexes, and without doubt we are too.

***

To sum up, we understand well that there exists a play of relative speeds inherent to
rhythm; on the one hand, differential movements of speeds and slowness, on the other,
modulations of possibilities: the putting into continuous variation of musical beings
and inflexions, the differential rhythms of sequential and simultaneous durations
(compossibility according to Leibniz, interior simultaneity for Nietzsche). Tristan: I
am the world.
The soul of the world, Rhythm is the essence of music: it is its most vital and
fundamental compound, its absolute necessity. Sonorous compossibility consists in
the simultaneity of exposition of multiplicities of motifs in variable and differential
rhythms, and in heterogeneous durations affirmed as real and co-present. Already the
propositions of the Timaeus encompass a multiplicity of heterogeneous and
irreducible temporalities, under the form of a plurality of wandering stars, each

15
possessing its own chronicity, its own singular movement, bound to the rhythm of its
trajectory (Plato, Timaeus, 39b-d, 41e). Insofar as it is Unequal, Rhythm is the a
priori founder of the syntheses of composition. An ontological fold between Time and
Silence, it unfolds the process of differenciation and effectuates the putting into
continuous variation of lines of simultaneous duration. Rhythm, great modulator of
Time and of duration, concretises synthetic sonorous modulation.
Rhythmic impulsion is the concrete and active face of constitutive difference.
Become material, it realises the composition of the plan of sonorous consistency. It is
why rhythmic pulsation literally incarnates of the soul of the world: repetitive
electronic sequences in Robert Fripp, displacement of accents in Philip Glass, the
nomadic machine in binary tempo in Kraftwerk, the industrial electrothrash machine
in Heldon, metallic syntheses and aggregates of voice become pure material in
Schizotrope.
Literature develops a particular kind of analogy with the musical machine: the
oscillation of the pendulum. It scans the eternity of Ubik, and the pure present of
compossibles.14 Strange creature of Dmons et Merveilles [a French edition of the
tales of Lovecraft], the entity Randolph Carter incarnates this compossibility.
Randolph Carter or rather all that he has been, is, and will be simultaneously
(Lovecraft) echoes Spinozas classic proposition: that the duration of things can be
held intact in a unique moment, which comprises eternity.15
From the imaginary music of Erich Zann to ethereal perfection of Parsifal, it is the
same absolute necessity and the same pulsation which traverses the world of sounds.
Lovecraft provides a description of the finite plane of integration, the species of
14 This peak of the present (see Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image [chapter 5]) unfolds events into
heterogeneous and simultaneous durations (perceptions, acts, ideas, dates, etc.) ends up leading to a
multiplicity of lines of irreducible realities in the novels of Philip K. Dick and Norman Spinrad.
15 [Pinhas here repeats Bergsons conception of Spinozist eternity in the third chapter of the Essay on
the Immediate Data of Consciousness. The conception is not derived directly from Spinozas texts].

16
absolute movement, by virtue of which sonorous production becomes a plane of
composition.

***

Sound permits a symbiosis between pulsation and rhythm capable of transmitting the
electronic radiation of matter; that becomes Matter-Movement and Matter-Time
(Deleuze). Music expresses the totality of the world: Through the truth of music the
passions themselves can be seized (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 4 [106]). The
grail of musical expression is the transvaluation that attends the beauty of an infinite
melody, where the motifs describe suspended themes that correspond organically to
the continuous modulation of movement: the transparency of the passions to music
and the auto-affirmation of necessity raised to the highest power. Like passions, music
is constituted out of breaths and meteorological elements (Nietzsche, Letters to Gast).
Out of reach of every interpretation, sonorous Ideas are incarnated in
effectuations, in perspectives, in combinations and inflexions (Rameau): the
autochronic nature of musical Beings is passion. If we take this perspective, the work
of Wagner not only reveals a physiology, but the integral essence of music, the
necessity held sacred by Webern.
It is necessary for the great passions that music becomes cosmic, an oscillatory
absolute movement. In July 1855, Liszt writes to Wagner: Go to the mountains,
compose, and put the whole sky into your music.

Saint-Lonard Val dIsre, Summer 2097.16

16 The text was first published in the web journal Synaesthesie in 1999, dated 30/9/1999, and
dedicated to Maurice G. Dantec and William S. Burroughs.

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Translated by C. Kerslake, 20.08.2008.